I Kick and I Fly with Ruchira Gupta

Annmarie Kelly:

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Sometimes I don't think I dream big enough. When I first became a writer, I used to joke that my goal was to publish a book and drive around with a cardboard box of copies in the trunk of my car.

I pictured myself sliding one into a little free library or asking a local indie store to stock the title, and I've done that.

When we meet a milestone, it's important to acknowledge that achievement, but also to keep moving the needle. That's not only true of the goals we have for ourselves, but for those we have for our neighborhood, our city, and beyond.

What can I dream that is bigger and bolder than what I dreamed before? One of the things I admire most about today's guest is her ability to keep moving the finish line.

Ruchira Gupta was a journalist in India reporting on one story when she stumbled upon another, young girls were going missing in a local village and being sold into prostitution in the city. Instead of only writing that news story, Ruchira set about targeting and dismantling sex trafficking across India and around the world.

Millions of women are victims of this horrifying trade. It would be easy to crumble in the face of that number and figure nothing can be done. Instead, Ruchira refuses to give up.

She testified before Indian Parliament and lobbied the United Nations. She filmed a documentary and founded a nonprofit. Ruchira kept asking questions.

She keeps sitting down with the families of the girls who were affected, kept asking what they needed to survive, and she figured out how to make more happen. Ruchira started with a single story and is leading of movement ongoing today.

Ruchira Gupta is the founder and president of Apne Aap Women Worldwide. She's a social justice activist, feminist campaigner, journalist, Emmy Award-winning documentarian, and professor at New York University, who has dedicated her life to creating a world where no child is bought or sold.

Ruchira has been awarded countless honors for her efforts to end female trafficking, including the French National Order of Merit, and the Clinton Global Citizen Award.

Ruchira divides her time between New York and Forbesganj, her childhood home, in the foothills of the Himalayas, where she paints her mother's garden. I Kick and I Fly, is her debut novel.

Ruchira Gupta, welcome to Wild Precious Life.

Ruchira Gupta:

Thank you, Annmarie. I'm so thrilled to be on your podcast because I love the name Wild Precious Life, and I love your story about how you started Wild Precious Life to heal, to share and build a community.

Annmarie Kelly:

Aww, I am so grateful that, as I was mentioning before, we are in a mutual admiration society, you and I, because I read your bio and you’re a social justice activist, a feminist campaigner, a journalist, professor, documentarian.

I was awed by the power that a single person can have to be an agent of change in this world. I often feel so powerless in the face of all that I want to fix, and I was so grateful to hear that you channeled that powerlessness, the powerlessness of the women and girls you seek to help.

And also, you as one person, one journalist, into this sisterhood, this community that has risen to affect real change. I'm just so grateful to know of your work.

Ruchira Gupta:

Thank you so much. I'm just so happy that here we are, two women connecting across India and the United States, across New York and Cleveland.

And just the power of stories in bringing us together that I wrote a story in a little village in India when a girl won a karate gold medal in my NGO, Apne Aap. And that story is now translated into a book for young American teens who can all be champions in their own way.

So, I Kick and I Fly is to share the story as widely as possible. So, I'm so happy that I'm talking to you.

Annmarie Kelly:

Well, I'd love to learn more about you. We are going to spend most of the interview, I think, talking about this book that you referenced.

But before we do that, I'd love to learn more about how you (this amazing woman), came to be who you are. Will you tell us some of your story?

Ruchira Gupta:

Yes. I used to be a girl growing up in Calcutta, which is one of the poorest cities in the world where Mother Teresa used to live. But something very unique in Calcutta is also the love of books, reading, writing, poetry. It's a city full of bookstores of writers, filmmakers.

And I was of course, at a very young age imbued with that culture. So, I wanted to be a writer too. And my first story, which is published, which I remember, is called The Autobiography of a Pencil. And it was published in my school magazine called Lotus Buds.

And then, of course, I decided after that that I'm going to be a writer, published writer more and more. So, I began to write, and somehow when I was just about to get into college, I found a job in a local newspaper, and they said, you have to be a graduate.

So, I negotiated, and I would go to work in this newspaper in the evening and go to college in the daytime.

And so, journalism became my method of writing at that time. And as a journalist, once I was traveling through the hills of Nepal, when I came across rows of villages with missing girls. I asked the men who were sitting around drinking tea, playing cards where the girls were. And to my horror and to my sort of surprise they said, they all are in Bombay, Mumbai, as it's now called.

And I couldn't understand how so many little girls could be in Bombay, which was like 1400, 1500 kilometers away. And these villages were so remote, they were like two and a half hours away from the highway.

And so, of course, as a good journalist, I quickly finished the story I was on, which was about how villagers manage their natural resources and started to actually explore this other story.

And I followed the trail, and I found to my horror that in my lifetime, in my generation, in my world, in my country, human trafficking still existed. And I saw that there was a smooth supply chain from these remote hamlets all the way to the brothels of Bombay, Delhi, Calcutta.

So, there would be a very poor innocent sort of farmer starving. He would let his daughter go, who was normally between the ages of 9 and 13, to a procurer who would say, “I'll get your daughter a job in the big city, or I'll get her married.” And he didn't even know anything about what big cities look like.

He would take $50, $100 to fix the leaking roof, to give medicines to the younger child and let the daughter go.

And this procurer would then put her in a bus or a train and take her to the border of India and Nepal. And there were these corrupt border guards wink-wink, nod-nod, the girl was taken across the border. On the other side were the agents who would just take over these girls and transport them again in trains, buses, cars, all the way to the brothels of Bombay, Calcutta.

And there they would be the pimps who would negotiate the price of the girls, depending on the beauty of the girl. Then the pimp would just buy this girl for again, 3, $400, hand her over to a brothel manager.

She would lock up the little girl in a room, and then the girl would be exploited for four or five years by multiple men every night. I have met girls who were in the room for so long, they didn't know what the streets looked like.

Then behind this brothel manager were of course, the organized criminal networks, the financiers, the landlords.

And finally, finally, there were the sex buyers who wanted little girls. They drove the demand for the industry.

And these girls were just consumed and thrown away, and they had children in the red-light districts, and the children were then used to replace them. And I had never seen this kind of hell.

As a journalist, I'd covered conflict, I'd covered war, I'd covered famine, but I'd never seen this scale of exploitation and that too of little girls. So, I think first I was very sad. Then I was angry, and I wanted to do something about it.

And because I was a journalist, I decided to tell the story. I made the documentary, somebody pulled out a knife at me while I was filming, and the women saved me who wanted to tell their stories in my documentary so that they could have a better future for their daughters.

People would throw stones at our cars. Our permissions were refused to go into villages. It was like a nightmare. But we did tell the story. Documentary did get a screening in Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and then HBO, it's called The Selling of Innocence.

And then what happened was that I won an Emmy for outstanding investigative journalism, and everyone was offering me more jobs and opportunities.

And instead of taking those, all I could see were the eyes of the women I had interviewed, the mothers of the children, and the mothers had told me that whatever had happened to them had happened, but they wanted a different life for their daughters.

So, I thought, I'm going to use my Emmy not to make more money or not to build a career, but I'm going to use it to make a difference there.

I took the documentary to the UN using the legitimacy of the Emmy and showed it there, and we managed to build alliances to get a whole new protocol to end trafficking in women and children.

And then I did the same thing. I took the documentary, The Selling of Innocence, and showed it to the U.S. Senate. At that time, the United States government didn't have a law on trafficking.

And then I went to the women, and I said, “What can I do for your children? Because, you had said you wanted something.” So, they said, “Educate our children.” I said, “Fine.” They said, “Start an NGO. Let's start an organization.” That was a bit daunting. We didn't know how to make a business plan. We didn't have any offices. We just sat on a straw mat on the floor.

And I asked the women what their dreams were, and they said they had four dreams. The first was school for their children, the second was a room of their own. Then the third thing they said was that they wanted a job in an office, which basically meant that they wanted sustainable and dignified livelihoods because the brothels are hell, rows of rooms, 20 rooms to one toilet, small windows, no ventilation, constant noise, 24/7. It's horrible.

No kitchens. Everyone's cooking on the floor. The children play on the floor while the women are servicing the customers on the bed. So, it was just horrible.

So yeah, I could understand what they meant. And the fourth thing was they said that they wanted those who had bought them and punished them to be punished. They said, those who had brokered away our dreams. So, their dreams actually became my business plan.

Fast forward, now I'm coming to the present. We have educated thousands of girls from red-light areas through school and even college. Many have jobs. And so, we have broken the cycle of intergenerational prostitution.

And at the same time, I also began to organize the women, because as the girls and boys were getting educated, the women began to realize that change was possible. And today, in Forbesganj which I write about in my book, I Kick and I Fly, when I began working there 20 something years ago, there were 72 brothels all down the street.

And every home, all these 72 brothels had a backroom where the customers would come and buy the girls. And behind that was the big sort of space where the annual carnival would come for farmers where cattle were sold, et cetera.

But along with cattle, girls were sold there. So, we not only got the girls, we started our own school, put the girls into the boarding school, and that's where I started karate classes, because these girls were being beaten, challenged when they were going.

So, I said, okay, even if they're going to be kidnapped, let them kick these guys in. So, I started karate classes for them, and that made a huge difference. The women organized — we helped them get government IDs. Most of them are undocumented. That gave them voting rights.

The moment they got voting cards, they became entities. And because of that, they began to get access to low-cost food and housing, and this reduced their vulnerability.

And when the traffickers tried to stop them, then they had more confidence to fight back. They fought back and they fought back, and they put the traffickers in jail. They testified in court. They got convictions.

We had my NGO Apne Aap put the first conviction for life imprisonment of a trafficker in India. So, the fourth dream that the women had, punishment of those who bought them and sold them.

And I, of course, because I had helped in the passage of the UN protocol and the U.S. Law, and I now had the experience of sitting in circles with the women, I was able to take notes and provide language to the commission, which was set up.

And for having a new trafficking definition included in the new sexual assault law that was coming up in Parliament. I was given time to go and testify in parliament about what I wanted. I gave half my time to a survivor leader from the NGO Apne Aap to speak along with me.

And it led to finally a change in the law and the trafficking bill becoming section 370 of the Indian Penal Code, which decriminalizes women and punishes the traffickers and ask for budget allocations for exit programs very specifically.

So, it's been a long journey, but I never had time to pause and think about it. I just kept doing the work. I saw that 20 years of work actually aided results and the red-light area is almost non-existent in Forbesganj now.

Where there were 72 brothels, there are only two. Even those will go very soon, because the women are aging out and we are not allowing them to bring in any girls there at all.

And the others, the front rooms have become small shops and businesses for the women, and the back rooms have become real homes. The traffickers are in jail, and the children are in school, college, and in jobs.

So, the entire area is transformed. And I thought, I've got to share this. And I began to think about it, when did it begin? How did it begin?

And then I had notes. I had started writing the plot of a book when the first girl in Forbesganj had won a gold medal in karate. And I said, I've got to tell this story. It really made a difference.

Annmarie Kelly:

Absolutely.

Ruchira Gupta:

So, that’s why I wrote I Kick and I Fly.

Annmarie Kelly:

It is such a triumph. And you wouldn't think in a story about women and girls in prostitution, you wouldn't think that you'd find hope there. But your story, the way you’re reporting and then your activism intersects with it, we do get to see change.

Change is often so slow that we don't notice it. So, the fact that you had a chance to stop and take stock of all that had happened while you were just so busy doing it.

I have a 13-year-old daughter. So, your story about the horrific world that awaits Heera is the name of the protagonist in I Kick and I Fly for those who've not yet had the honor to read it yet, your story about the horrific world, that awaited Heera really hit me in a very soft and tender place.

And for folks who are listening, I mean, I heard you say this, and I think that as a parent, it's very hard for me to comprehend, but why on earth would a parent sell their own child into prostitution?

Ruchira Gupta:

Yeah. The subjugation of nomadic tribes has been so horrifying, horrific. And it's not like overnight, they've been subjugated for like 150 years. So, from grandfather to son to grandson, to again the next man. And it just goes on.

So, they begin to believe this is their destiny. And also, every time somebody in these nomadic tribes resist or say no, they're beaten up by upper-caste or upper-class gangs, and there is literally no police protection for them.

So, nobody will show up for them saying, “Why are you beating them up? Or Why are you not giving them a job? Or why are you forcing them to join a criminal gang?” So, it's done under many compulsions and pressures.

And I think if you ask me to go deep into Heera's father's mind who wanted to sell his daughter it's also that I think, slowly to just survive and live they desensitize themselves as a coping mechanism. So, it takes a lot to rekindle the human spirit.

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Annmarie Kelly:

When we meet Heera at the beginning of your book, she's a 14-year-old girl. She's absolutely living in abject poverty. I mean, her family of five is subsisting on a handful of rice and it's soaked in water.

I can see how you'd feel you needed something if you were the father, you'd feel you're not providing something, economic reasons to bring in money. This is a means to an end.

And she's in school and she's being bullied because she's the child of these families who turn to prostitution. So, she's being bullied for what she hasn't even become yet.

She's in school because her mom's hoping to keep her out of prostitution, and in school she's being bullied.

And you have this spunk and this fierceness in this girl who wants to fight back, who's knocking the teeth out of people. But she doesn't have self-defense. She doesn't have training yet.

And so, I thought that the way you melded together, the powerlessness of Heera's situation. It's so much bigger than she is, these forces that expect her to just turn to prostitution like her cousin, like all these people.

The powerlessness of her situation, and then the power of training in the martial arts, you wrote somewhere or said somewhere that “Self-defense means I have a self worth defending.”

Oh, I got chills at the thought of that, that to teach a child self-defense is to let her know that you are worth it. You are worth defending, you are worth fighting for. Your life means something. And watching Heera come into her own, and in your story, she learns kung fu, which I will confess was surprising to me.

I didn't know that kung fu came to India. I didn't realize that that was a martial art that she would learn there.

Ruchira Gupta:

So, self-defense is something, the power of our bodies, we don't know it. And there's so much body shaming out there, I've realized, all of us are always told, sit straight, don't slouch. Don't sit with your legs apart. Or your dress is transparent or you're too fat, too thin.

I don't know, a hundred different ways we are body shamed, and it has such an impact on our self-esteem. I find this a real problem in everyday life.

And then when you are in a red-light area about to be sold for your body, I notice such a strange relationship that women have, and girls have with their bodies. They hate their bodies because they think that they're going to be exploited because of their bodies.

So, they hunch, the shoulders turn in to hide their breasts, they'll cover their heads. They walk as if they're almost invisible and all of that, until they have to then and on at the command of the brothel manager suddenly stand poking their breasts out. And putting hankies and phones inside the blouses to make their breasts look bigger, put lipstick, and then suddenly sexualize themselves.

So, this is so stupid from one extreme to the other, but it's also so outrageous what we make a human being do.

That's why I was thinking that. When I began Apne Aap, I knew that I had to overcome this barrier about the body, and I really didn't know how, because everything was invented as we went along. And that's why it's a good thing that my NGO's name is also called Apne Aap, which means self-action because we literally had to figure it out.

And so, we thought, okay, dance, mime. And then I used to walk and drive by, and I used to see this group of people teaching these boys in white uniforms karate. And I said, why not try karate? And I myself had always loved Bruce Lee and Enter the Dragon, and I used to sing that song all the time. Everybody loves kung fu fighting, those kids were fast as lightning.

So, I used to like him. I liked his philosophy. He was very big in India. There are karate kung fu and all kinds of martial arts classes across India, so it's easy to find teachers too.

But also, many people believe that kung fu comes from China, but some people also believe that kung fu comes from India. And there was some Buddhist monk called Bodhidharma, who used to be this martial arts yogi kind of person, who then migrated to China and went to a Shaolin temple and made friends with people there and taught them this.

And the worlds are so similar between Chan and Dan and Gian as it's circulates between Japan, China, and India in martial arts. I can understand some of the meanings of the words, because I know something in some original language, perhaps, I don't know, maybe I'm imagining it. But anyway, there is a connectivity and I find that also fascinating.

Annmarie Kelly:

And there are some quotes from Bruce Lee in the book, and that one quote, “Be like water.” I will confess at first, I'm like, “Well, I don't see how being like water is going to help her in this situation.”

But as the story unfurls, we get these explanations. You write, “Water is the softest substance in the world, yet it can penetrate the hardest. It's impossible to grasp a handful of it, yet it does not suffer, hurt. Stab it, and it is not wounded, sever it, yet it is not divided. It has no shape of its own but molds itself to the receptacle that contains it.”

And I started to see the way that these teachings would absolutely mirror what the young girls in their powerlessness would feel. You have another quote that says, “You cannot be powerful all the time, or you will break,” and knowing when to be flexible and when to be strong but be like water flow. Don't crash.

The way that Heera becomes like water, both flexible and strong, was really beautiful the way you wrote her.

Ruchira Gupta:

Thank you. And for me, it was also the character how she develops. And there are two characters here. One is Rini Di, the woman's right advocate.

Annmarie Kelly:

I kept making her you, by the way. She just kept becoming you in my mind.

Ruchira Gupta:

Kind of, not all of it but …

So, there’s Rini Di who's like a perfectionist. So, she's very controlling, and she always wants to create the perfect situation. So, her problem is that she wants to control.

And there is Heera who's a child off the streets. She's a street fighter. So, she's impulsive, she fights, she lacks control, which is why she keeps losing.

So, both have to make their own journey, and they learn from each other, the adult from the girl and the girl from the adult, through the practice of kung fu, how to let go and how to take control.

And the centering your chi as it's known is kung fu. How do you find it? And you have to be like water to be able to reach that. And so, Bruce Lee was very wise.

Annmarie Kelly:

Your reference to Rini Di also made me think about the larger activism in this book, because yes, she's helping one girl in our story, but she's also tapped into this. This is not limited to the small town in Northern India, where Heera comes from, these atrocities are happening globally.

And sometimes what would be best for Heera, right then, this one person is not what's best for the larger collective, that if Heera runs in and confronts one person who's doing wrong, it's going to actually set back investigations that Rini Di is doing in other places.

So, I thought about that. Sometimes fighting on behalf of one individual means you're going to let down a whole group of people, or that if you're fighting on behalf of a group, it means one person is feeling alone.

But I'm sure that in your activism, you've surely confronted times when you aren't feeling like you can help everyone the way that you want to help them.

Ruchira Gupta:

Every day, every day. And I get so many messages because I've tried to be accessible and out there, and sometimes I wish I wasn't so accessible. But it's so flooded by calls and messages and emails, and everybody thinks that I will be able to do everything. And I don't, I'm not a magician.

But the one thing that I've learned as an activist, and as someone who's tried to do something, is that do what you can. It doesn't matter if it's big or small, only time will show.

And that's what's happened in my own life. Because when I was doing that, making a movie, or I was sitting in a circle or on a straw mat in Bombay, I thought, oh, I'll go away and live my life, be a journalist or work for the UN, whatever, and these 22 women are going to run their circle and send their kids to school.

It doesn't work like that. We all worked at it together, and I built greater and greater alliances around the world.

But also, I didn't know it was going to become this big thing, which would become an example to the world, which would be a story of hope, of success. I didn't comprehend that I would succeed.

I knew I wanted to, and I had this determination that, anyway, it's so bad that whatever I do is going to be incrementally better, but I didn't know it would be transformative. I've transformed the whole red-light area into a non red-light area.

I could call it a green-light area if I could plant trees. And that's my next project is to have an avenue of trees in there.

So, anything is possible if we put our minds to it, and we don't think about the perfect thing that we create and then begin the work, we have to begin work in the immediate.

The other thing I learned as an activist is that many people like to create frameworks and Excel spreadsheets and all of that. And I worked in the UN, so of course I did all that. And I think there's an importance in that in terms of management, but not at the cost of the real grassroots work with real human beings. It cannot ever replace that. No Excel sheet can replace a girl.

And I remember my team members would collect data and they would say, “Oh, the data says this.” I said, “But I can see the flesh and blood person in front of me. I don't need the data. I have a human being who's talking in front of me saying she's in college. So, I don't know if she's in your Excel spreadsheet or not.”

And I think we have to understand that, really understand that. And if we want people to listen to us, like as a feminist, if I wanted change, I also realized that I've got to listen to people. I had to sit on the straw in the circle because the best solutions came from those who had experienced the problem.

They don't come from people who are sitting theoretically and writing up frameworks. Never, ever.

Annmarie Kelly:

Well, I think that what you're describing, I think that there's something powerful about this story that begins on a straw mat in Northern India that then spreads a across the world.

And I was thinking about why I was myself so moved. Of course, it's as a mother of daughters, but it's also as inhabiting a female body in 2023.

Heera’s cousin says something beautiful. Heera’s cousin has been sold into prostitution. She's trapped in the very thing that your organization is trying to get women out of. But she says, “No one has any right to a woman's body. Women should have the freedom to go out night or day, to wear what they want, marry whom they want, study what they want, and have the livelihood they desire. No one owns them. They have the right to a life without fear.”

And again, those sentences were written about poor girls in India who believed themselves destined for prostitution.

But as a middle-aged woman living in America today, I could not help but hear echoes of this desire for bodily autonomy in the conversations we're having right here in our country where women often feel like second class citizens, even though the books say different these problems exist here too.

So, somehow the stories for me became very connected that the story of a child in Northern India and the story of women in America today, that we actually all want very similar things, for our bodies to be our own.

Ruchira Gupta:

Absolutely. And you are so right. And that's exactly why I wrote I Kick and I Fly, and I wanted to publish with Scholastic. And I'm so glad Scholastic is my publisher because I thought, the success of Heera, where the adversity was so great, like a little village in Bihar, in Forbesganj where literally nothing exists except dirt and poverty. To show that if that can work, anything can work.

And I wanted to share this with the next girl who's facing similar challenges in a different context to learn from Heera's story. I wanted girls here and boys here to learn that they can stand up to injustice. They can fight for control of their own bodies and win.

And there are lots of clues right through the book for young people, which is why I chose young adult as my medium of writing. I chose Scholastic as my publisher precisely for that.

And that's why you'll see that while the backdrop is this dark world of sex trafficking, the main story is about a girl who's fighting back, fighting back, and winning, fighting back, and winning. And it's a very fast paced social justice adventure.

And so, I think it's palatable. And when I was writing, I was also sharing it with my twin nephew and niece, a boy and a girl. And interestingly enough, as I was writing the chapters, part one, part two, I would give it to this boy first and he would say, “Oh, 8 on 10.” By the time I finished it, he said, “Okay, 10 on 10.”

I used to ask him, I said, “What were the scenes, which affected you a lot?” I asked my nephew and he said, “I want to know more about Salman, the brother of Heera who wants to cut his dreams to size, get out of school and work as a porter in a shop to help his sister stay in school.”

And I said, “Yeah, I'm sure you do want to know Salman. Salman wants to be a scientist, an astrophysicist, but his school is in a poor neighborhood. It doesn't have a science lab.”

Annmarie Kelly:

Well, Salman, Heera's older brother also has this allyship with her because he too was expected to follow a path that if the girls become prostitutes, their brothers become pimps. It's a family business.

But he in some ways has more power to break the cycle, because education for a boy is at least considered maybe a little bit more than for a girl.

But he's still up against the family expectation that he will join this business, and he has to stand up in ways that are uncomfortable, which I think gives young boys an understanding that in fighting for women's equity, whatever that looks like, there's a role for them to play too. That prostitution does not happen without men buying women, right?

Ruchira Gupta:

Yeah.

Annmarie Kelly:

So, that there is a role for men to say no, no to all of this.

Ruchira Gupta:

Absolutely. And they can really help, because I've seen this, there is a boy like Salman, there are many boys like Salman, in the NGO that I work with, and I keep remembering them and how they did not want to go down this path.

And I watch how they're dehumanized and desensitized and groomed into pimping. It's terrible. It's terrible.

So yeah, there's a different masculinity that we can think about. I always think there used to be a word called gentleman, and if you use the word gentleman, then obviously we wanted … if that was the higher standard for a man, it was his gentleness. That's how the word gentleman must have come into be.

Annmarie Kelly:

I love this. I could talk to you all day about this book, but they don't let us. I always wrap with kind of just multiple choice questions. These are just about you, the person, and your worldview. They are playful. And give listeners a chance to get to know another couple of aspects of the guest. Is that okay?

Ruchira Gupta:

Yes, of course. Yeah.

Annmarie Kelly:

Alright, you just pick one. Okay? Coffee or tea?

Ruchira Gupta:

Coffee.

Annmarie Kelly:

Mountains or beach?

Ruchira Gupta:

Beach.

Annmarie Kelly:

Dogs or cats?

Ruchira Gupta:

Dogs.

Annmarie Kelly:

Would you rather be able to kick or fly?

Ruchira Gupta:

Fly.

Annmarie Kelly:

Which do you prefer more, Little Women or To Kill a Mockingbird?

Ruchira Gupta:

Right now, To Kill a Mockingbird.

Annmarie Kelly:

I loved how the girls were reading little women in this book, the timelessness of that story. But of course, when you're fighting for justice, a To Kill a Mockingbird would certainly resonate too.

Are you an early bird or a night owl?

Ruchira Gupta:

Early bird.

Annmarie Kelly:

And are you a risk taker or the person who always knows where the band-aids are?

Ruchira Gupta:

Risk taker all the time. Edge of adventure.

Annmarie Kelly:

Do you have a favorite movie or a favorite song or a pop culture reference that people might latch on to that you like?

Ruchira Gupta:

The latest song that I like very much is Flowers.

Annmarie Kelly:

My girls have been listening to that.

Ruchira Gupta:

I love it. Really love it.

Annmarie Kelly:

Buy Yourself Flowers. Yes.

Ruchira Gupta:

Yes.

Annmarie Kelly:

Last two, do you have a favorite ice cream?

Ruchira Gupta:

Yes. The Talenti Chocolate.

Annmarie Kelly:

Oh yes. I've had this, it's very nice, with a twist off lid. And when I open it up, I'm like, “Who is eating all the ice cream?” And usually, the answer is me.

Ruchira Gupta:

Yeah.

Annmarie Kelly:

And the last one. This is just a fill in the blank snapshot. If we were to take a picture of you really happy and doing something you love, what would we see?

Ruchira Gupta:

Three things possibly. You would either see me painting in a garden or you would see me crouched into a corner with a book, or I would be walking by a river.

Annmarie Kelly:

I love envisioning all of those things for you. Ruchira Gupta, thank you so much for making time today.

Ruchira Gupta:

Love chatting with you, Annmarie. And who knows, I might end up in Cleveland, Ohio, in some bookstores, so we hopefully meet again.

[Music Playing]

Annmarie Kelly:

Absolutely. I think that our paths will cross on this journey of starting your organization Apne Aap. You wrote that, “I had no magic wand, no experience or knowledge, but I had resolve. I had invented ways to move forward.”

And in this conversation, you talked about not being a magician, but you are magical, Ruchira Gupta. You do have magic. And thank you for your courage and resolve to show us the power of women coming together for justice and change.

Folks, Ruchira Gupta's novel, her debut novel is called I Kick and I Fly. You can find it wherever books are sold. It is a Scholastic book, so hopefully you're also going to see it in book clubs and in schools around the country.

To everyone listening, we're wishing you love and light wherever this day takes you, be good to yourself, be good to one another, and we'll see you again soon on this wild and precious journey.

Wild Precious Life is a production of Evergreen Podcasts. Special thanks to executive producers Gerardo Orlando and Michael DeAloia, producer, Sarah Willgrube and audio engineer, Ian Douglas.

Be sure to subscribe and follow us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

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