A staggering 194 million people in India go hungry every day. One in every four children is malnourished, making the country home to one third of the world’s malnourished children. Close to 3,000 of these die every single day, due to diet related illnesses.

Yet, when these alarming statistics take on the face of those we encounter at every turn, we avoid eye contact, turn away, and look everywhere but at the person pleading for help.

We see it every day. Around street corners, in the neighborhoods, at traffic signals, peeping in through the gleaming windows of the mall, waiting hopefully outside crowded restaurants. Sometimes on the weathered face of an old man, sometimes on the dirt-streaked face of an orphan, sometimes in the eyes of a tired mother, desperate to feed her lonely child. The haunted, lingering look of hunger.