For as long as I can remember, my father told me bedtime stories and so I wanted to be a storyteller just like him. I wanted to write stories about girls who fix problems. I was ten years old when the school magazine published my article titled - The Autobiography of a Pencil. I immediately resolved to become a journalist. I didn’t have much interest in going to college but the newspaper I wanted to work at in Kolkata refused to give me a job without a degree. So, I started going to college in the daytime and to work in the evenings. While on a work assignment in Nepal, I stumbled upon rows of villages with missing girls. I asked the villagers where all the girls were, and the answer changed my life. I found that little girls, as young as twelve years old, were smuggled across the border and sold to brothels in India. As a journalist, I had covered famine and conflict in the past, but I had never witnessed such intimate violence and on such a scale. I related the story of some of these women in a documentary called The Selling of Innocents, and won an Emmy for Outstanding Investigative Journalism. Still, I knew there was more work to do. So, I quit journalism and started an NGO, Apne Aap, inside the red-light areas of India and began to work with the United Nations all over the world. Slowly but surely, I became part of a global movement against sex-trafficking, striving to create a world wherein no human being is bought or sold.

I have won many awards and made many friends along the way, but I know that my work is far from finished. I wrote I Kick and I Fly and The Freedom Seeker to inspire younger people to join our movement. I am still happiest when I can curl up in a corner with a book or take a walk with my dog.