 "'Rice may not be as much fun as ice, but it will still do well'")
While the world was being consumed by a social media tsunami called ALS Ice Bucket Challenge started to create awareness for the Lou Gehrig's disease making people pour buckets of ice water on their heads, Manju Latha Kalanidhi, a 38-year-old journalist from Hyderabad, came up with a simpler and a less wasteful solution: donating a bucket of rice instead.
Manju says she had no idea that posting a simple picture of herself donating a bucket of rice to a needy person with the hashtag #RiceBucketChallenge would make her an internet celebrity worldwide. With global coverage from news publications, such as The Huffington Post, Time magazine and ABC Australia, Manju Latha Kalanidhi has been overwhelmed by the response her idea received.
In an interview with Anisha Dutta, Manju speaks about why she thought of starting the Rice Bucket Challenge.
What prompted the idea of the Rice Bucket Challenge?
Obviously, the Ice bucket Challenge. I saw a lot of these videos, it initially sounded nice and I thought it was a very American cause and I thought it was good for the American demographic but when a lot of Indians started doing it without even thinking what exactly it was, it really angered me. I actually spoke to a couple of people who did take the Ice bucket challenge. I asked why they were doing it and they responded 'I don’t know, I just did it because it was fun'. They were doing it just for the novelty. I felt people were just copying the West blindly and it got me thinking.
Incidentally I work for a rice research journal called 'oryza.com' and as part of a lot of my daily work I need to do a lot of research on rice. So essentially I do a lot of stories on hunger, a lot of stories on rice. I think somewhere down the line I connected that. It wasn't like I had any big campaign I was going to begin. It was just a very small post on my Facebook page.
ALSO READ: ALS Ice Bucket challenge reaches India
Was it entirely your initiative or was it in partnership with your company, which is a journal for rice research?
See, I shared my idea (with the company) on Day One. As soon as I posted this message on Facebook, I sent it to my colleague. She said ‘You have our full support’, and if you go on our site one of the first posts we've done is on saving water and donating rice.
Was it in some way a marketing move for your company?
No way! We are associated with rice and I said I'm doing something for rice and they told me to go ahead. When I started, I said in connection with this – why waste water when you can donate rice? It is so much cleaner, greener, you don’t have to get wet. I just wrote one small write-up. Then somebody came and said he started this Facebook page and why don’t I have a look. So my company is also working with that right now. I just started off Sunday morning and the page took shape and my page started getting big. I started getting calls from all sorts of websites, movie channels etc Monday was the most hectic Monday of my life! I had to go for a live show on TV99 in Hyderabad. Someone from Chennai, an NRI, donated Rs 9000. Pictures started pouring in. It was just phenomenal , it was the social media tsunami that took us by storm and that’s it. From there, we went to a point of no return. International media picked it up.
Do you think that despite the criticism Indians face for copying the West blindly and doing the ALS challenge for the novelty of it, it actually sparked an interest in donating to charities, a trend which is not seen often in the country?
Yes, I agree. And I think there is a small incentive in this – when you post something and get so many likes, there is a small selfish motive but there is nothing wrong as long as you’re doing it for a good cause. There was cynicism for the Ice Bucket Challenge and that too for the people who had no idea about it and were copying the West blindly. To make it local, I wanted to make it 'desi', so the collaboration of all this is what gave birth to the Rice Bucket challenge.
It could be. Like I said, it could be a fad like the ‘Kolaveri Di’ song. The thing is, for me, it was important for me to take it to a logical leaning. It shouldn't be like within a week or 10 days when the media coverage dies, I let it go. I’ll have to think of doing something to make it sustain. The beauty of this whole thing is I'm not asking people to give me money to donate, I'm not even telling you to give it a particular charity. Give it to any charity, your maid, your driver, your watchman, anybody. In India, there is no dearth to the number of people who can receive rice, people are glad to receive rice.
You have recently partnered with Ravishly, a women's news and entertainment site, with the aim of taking this challenge global. Have you thought about evolving this into a bigger movement towards ending hunger in the country . Have you been approached by NGOs or other organisations who are working towards ending hunger and furthering your cause?
Yeah, a lot of people and organizations like Air Asia have come and contacted me. I’m still a bit overwhelmed and it is too early for me to commit to people. I don’t want to dilute the concept so it is very important for me to think and take the next step.
The most important question is how sustainable is this? There is a growing argument about providing sustainable solutions for the poor rather than just keeping them dependent on welfare-like activities/charity. In that sense, one person may give a bowl of rice one day to a needy person, but what happens on Day 2 or 3 or Day 30? How does one follow up and make sure that person is still getting it?
This has to be in a couple of phases. Phase 1 is to ensure that the maximum number people give at least one bowl of rice and it is not about the numbers game in social media. Currently 500,000 people have seen the post, there 50,000 likes. There are lots of messages in my inbox, people who are posting pictures doing it. So Phase One is to just create awareness that there is something you can do, and the second is that we want people to put photographs of doing the challenge because we don’t know if they’re doing it or just saying they've done it. So I think that concrete proof that they’re doing it would get more people to join.
How are you going to sustain the continuity?
The first month we will focus on this (Phase One), later on what we are going to do is to send people reminders on their birthdays saying that these are the three organizations that may require your rice, something like that, and I will have to sit and think of how to take this further as I've been too overwhelmed with interviews and the response.
One of the biggest factors that helped the ALS challenge go viral was that it was fun to do and watch, and thus ended up becoming viral and spreading awareness. Do you think that would be a challenge to your version of the challenge as, since the fun element is not there?
That is the point, there is no fun element to rice. The 'desi' twist that we added to the ice bucket challenge phenomena is our USP, right now my focus is on India. Later on I would like to give it a twist.
Manju says she had no idea that posting a simple picture of herself donating a bucket of rice to a needy person with the hashtag #RiceBucketChallenge would make her an internet celebrity worldwide. With global coverage from news publications, such as The Huffington Post, Time magazine and ABC Australia, Manju Latha Kalanidhi has been overwhelmed by the response her idea received.
In an interview with Anisha Dutta, Manju speaks about why she thought of starting the Rice Bucket Challenge.
What prompted the idea of the Rice Bucket Challenge?
Obviously, the Ice bucket Challenge. I saw a lot of these videos, it initially sounded nice and I thought it was a very American cause and I thought it was good for the American demographic but when a lot of Indians started doing it without even thinking what exactly it was, it really angered me. I actually spoke to a couple of people who did take the Ice bucket challenge. I asked why they were doing it and they responded 'I don’t know, I just did it because it was fun'. They were doing it just for the novelty. I felt people were just copying the West blindly and it got me thinking.
Incidentally I work for a rice research journal called 'oryza.com' and as part of a lot of my daily work I need to do a lot of research on rice. So essentially I do a lot of stories on hunger, a lot of stories on rice. I think somewhere down the line I connected that. It wasn't like I had any big campaign I was going to begin. It was just a very small post on my Facebook page.
ALSO READ: ALS Ice Bucket challenge reaches India
Was it entirely your initiative or was it in partnership with your company, which is a journal for rice research?
See, I shared my idea (with the company) on Day One. As soon as I posted this message on Facebook, I sent it to my colleague. She said ‘You have our full support’, and if you go on our site one of the first posts we've done is on saving water and donating rice.
Was it in some way a marketing move for your company?
No way! We are associated with rice and I said I'm doing something for rice and they told me to go ahead. When I started, I said in connection with this – why waste water when you can donate rice? It is so much cleaner, greener, you don’t have to get wet. I just wrote one small write-up. Then somebody came and said he started this Facebook page and why don’t I have a look. So my company is also working with that right now. I just started off Sunday morning and the page took shape and my page started getting big. I started getting calls from all sorts of websites, movie channels etc Monday was the most hectic Monday of my life! I had to go for a live show on TV99 in Hyderabad. Someone from Chennai, an NRI, donated Rs 9000. Pictures started pouring in. It was just phenomenal , it was the social media tsunami that took us by storm and that’s it. From there, we went to a point of no return. International media picked it up.
Do you think that despite the criticism Indians face for copying the West blindly and doing the ALS challenge for the novelty of it, it actually sparked an interest in donating to charities, a trend which is not seen often in the country?
Yes, I agree. And I think there is a small incentive in this – when you post something and get so many likes, there is a small selfish motive but there is nothing wrong as long as you’re doing it for a good cause. There was cynicism for the Ice Bucket Challenge and that too for the people who had no idea about it and were copying the West blindly. To make it local, I wanted to make it 'desi', so the collaboration of all this is what gave birth to the Rice Bucket challenge.
Manju Latha Kalanidhi, 38-year-old journalist from Hyderabad, came up with a simpler and a less wasteful solution: donating a bucket of rice
It could be. Like I said, it could be a fad like the ‘Kolaveri Di’ song. The thing is, for me, it was important for me to take it to a logical leaning. It shouldn't be like within a week or 10 days when the media coverage dies, I let it go. I’ll have to think of doing something to make it sustain. The beauty of this whole thing is I'm not asking people to give me money to donate, I'm not even telling you to give it a particular charity. Give it to any charity, your maid, your driver, your watchman, anybody. In India, there is no dearth to the number of people who can receive rice, people are glad to receive rice.
You have recently partnered with Ravishly, a women's news and entertainment site, with the aim of taking this challenge global. Have you thought about evolving this into a bigger movement towards ending hunger in the country . Have you been approached by NGOs or other organisations who are working towards ending hunger and furthering your cause?
Yeah, a lot of people and organizations like Air Asia have come and contacted me. I’m still a bit overwhelmed and it is too early for me to commit to people. I don’t want to dilute the concept so it is very important for me to think and take the next step.
The most important question is how sustainable is this? There is a growing argument about providing sustainable solutions for the poor rather than just keeping them dependent on welfare-like activities/charity. In that sense, one person may give a bowl of rice one day to a needy person, but what happens on Day 2 or 3 or Day 30? How does one follow up and make sure that person is still getting it?
This has to be in a couple of phases. Phase 1 is to ensure that the maximum number people give at least one bowl of rice and it is not about the numbers game in social media. Currently 500,000 people have seen the post, there 50,000 likes. There are lots of messages in my inbox, people who are posting pictures doing it. So Phase One is to just create awareness that there is something you can do, and the second is that we want people to put photographs of doing the challenge because we don’t know if they’re doing it or just saying they've done it. So I think that concrete proof that they’re doing it would get more people to join.
How are you going to sustain the continuity?
The first month we will focus on this (Phase One), later on what we are going to do is to send people reminders on their birthdays saying that these are the three organizations that may require your rice, something like that, and I will have to sit and think of how to take this further as I've been too overwhelmed with interviews and the response.
One of the biggest factors that helped the ALS challenge go viral was that it was fun to do and watch, and thus ended up becoming viral and spreading awareness. Do you think that would be a challenge to your version of the challenge as, since the fun element is not there?
That is the point, there is no fun element to rice. The 'desi' twist that we added to the ice bucket challenge phenomena is our USP, right now my focus is on India. Later on I would like to give it a twist.