119) Living with Aids -4

JWT got the USAIDS account and my presentation at the pitch was much appreciated. They had an Rs.4 crores annual advertising budget for the state and in recession times, it was a bounty for us.

I still remember the first campaign Piyush Pandey had visualized. Out first campaign addressed “discrimination stigmas” where the celebrated adman used Shabana Azmi on a rocking TV commercial.

For a print out, we wanted a testimonial of a fashionable woman from the city and that search led us on Ms. Pooja Nanda. She was a model and as articulate and suave as can be.

Her tale of courage went beyond her makeup as we recorded her tale. Over to the tapes:
“I work as a model and TV artist. I discovered I was HIV-positive in 1998.
I went along to the hospital with a friend of mine who was very ill at the time.
A very badly trained nurse asked him to be tested for HIV.

So I said I would have the test too, just to offer him some moral support.
But his came out negative and mine came out positive. That's how I discovered I had the virus. Knowing that if you catch pneumonia you could die... that's what's bad, having that worry. Knowing that nobody wants to have a relationship with you because they could catch the same virus and they would be condemned to death too.
People started turning away from me.

One thing that would make me very happy would be to be loved, to be cherished, desired. To have a husband who loves me as I am...

I feel that I'm living with a bomb inside me and that the merest of movements might trigger it off.

I can't get caught in the rain because if I do, it could turn into a cold, and this could turn into pneumonia.

I'm an honest person and I have my dignity. I honour my duties, I don't harm anybody and I try to help people. But none of this has been enough to fulfil my needs.
I continue feeling the need to be loved.

My father committed suicide after finding out I was HIV positive, my first boyfriend died on my birthday and my mother - who had adopted me from a young age - died at the same time as my husband left me.

I was left very much alone. I even tried to kill myself with an overdose.
Our government does provide free anti-retroviral treatment, but providing the drugs alone is not enough.

It is true that Aids kills, but the prejudice, the discrimination and the mental sickness that comes with it are as damaging as the virus itself.

These 8 years has been dreadful and I yet I survive to tell the tale,” as a smile lit up on her beautiful face.

I am not demonstrative or given to displays of affection. I hugged her clasping her hands as we wound that session. I had a campaign to unfold next week and Pooja’s tale was a real guts n glory.