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[Author: Shivani Chaudhry | Date Published: 29 June 2009]                                         Brazil flows in my blood. All the time. Even when I'm afar. A Brazilian rhythm beats in my heart, always... And when I arrive here, in this land of love, passion, hope, faith, struggle, beauty, and abundant affection and warmth, my heart sings and my veins throb with the passion of being alive... For that's what Brazil is for me. Living without repression, feeling without thinking, expressing without fear. Touching hearts. Being touched. Being overwhelmed. As the Italian photographer Alex Magoli so rightly said, "People go to psychologists, I go to Brazil..." Because Brazil has this incredible ability to heal... to restore... to revive... to give... to be... It's where you find beauty in pain, music in melancholy, warmth in strangers, passion in every moment. Where every ...

[Author: Shivani Chaudhry | Date Published: 1 June 2009] Another street-associated child who I knew and was fond of, passes away, leaving me deeply grieved and dismayed. I don’t know who to blame anymore. Pradhan , a twelve-year-old boy, succumbed to injuries on 6 April 2009, after being hit by a truck at the Moti Bagh flyover in Delhi. No child should have to die at twelve. No child should have to be on the streets. I couldn’t believe it. I wept. It couldn’t be happening again. Radhakrishna , a boy who sold newspapers at the same traffic light, passed away on 4 October 2005. His death changed my life. And even though I tried, I wasn’t able to change the lives of the street children around me. Radhakrishna’s untimely passing away shook me deeply. In an attempt to process my grief, I wrote an article on him in the weekly newspaper - Tehelka.* In his memory, I set up a fund for the education of street children around Moti Bagh. The short piece I wrote on Radhakrishna in Tehelka received ...