Where does the motivation to cause change come from?

...For Kailash Satyarthi, the impulse surfaced at age seven. Satyarthi is the founder of the South Asian Coalition on Child Servitude (SACCS), an organization based in Delhi, India that has reportedly won release for 40,000 slave laborers, many of them children, and is now campaiging across India to promote free and compulsory schooling for children up to age 14. Satyarthi's "Rugmark" trademark, which guarantees that a rug has been manufactured without child labor, has brought powerful market pressures to bear on rug manufacturers in South Asia, forcing many to stop employing children.

In 1961, when Satyarthi was seven years old – a high-caste Brahmin boy growing up in the conservative state of Madhya Pradesh -- he was standing outside his school watching a cobbler working with his son. He couldn't figure out why the boy – who looked to be his age -- wasn't in school. He asked the cobbler.

"My son has to work because he is an untouchable," he was told. "That is his fate."

"It seemed so unfair," Satyarthi recalled.

Other things seemed unfair, too.

In his town, it was untouchable women who swept the streets and cleaned the open toilets. When they came along Satyarthi's street to beg for food, they wouldn't dare touch even the fences outside the houses. They would shout and people would throw coins and pieces of bread in the direction of their buckets. If the bread landed in the dirt, the women wiped it off and kept it. Satyarthi would run and snatch pieces of bread from the women and eat it before anyone could stop him. He knew that this was a terrible and grave offense. "It was the only time my parents ever hit me," he recalled. "And I would think, 'Why do they throw the bread on the ground?'"

In 1969, when Satyarthi was fifteen, India was commemorating the centenary of Gandhi's birth with celebrations across the country. Streets and parks were re-named, statues erected, rallies and exhibitions held. Gandhi had campaigned against untouchability, referring to untouchables as "Harijan" -- or "children of God." (Today, they prefer the term "Dalit" or "the oppressed.") Satyarthi attended a rally and heard politicians passionately denouncing untouchability. "It was a very emotional day for me," he recalled. "I found what they said very beautiful."

It gave him an idea. In his town, Vidisha, untouchability was deeply ingrained. You never saw them in restaurants or temples; they lived like a species apart. "I thought I would organize a feast," he recalled. "The sweeper women would be invited to cook and the big politicians would be invited to eat. It would send a strong signal to the whole town. I thought it would be a great symbol to break the caste hegemony. We would hold it in the newly built Gandhi park near the new Gandhi statue."

Friends said he was crazy. But he managed to persuaded a few to help.

Satyarthi approached some sweeper women.

"What are you talking about?" they said. "How can you possibly think people will come and eat?"

"I heard their speeches," Satyarthi said.

They laughed. "You're very naive."

Still, he convinced them to do the cooking. If no one came, they would share a good meal.

The boys rode their bicycles around town, dropping off invitations at fifty or sixty houses. The response was encouraging. People said, "Okay, good idea, very progressive." Some said, "Can we bring friends?" They expected thirty to actually show up.

"In the evening I saw these sweeper women come to cook," Satyarthi said. "They must have washed themselves and their clothes one hundred times. They looked so clean."

And for the first time he worried: Would there be enough food?

The feast was called for seven o'clock. By seven, no one had come. Satyarthi thought: 'Okay, it's Indian time, don't worry.' By eight, still no one had arrived.

"We thought there must be some confusion about the location in Gandhi park," Satyarthi said.

He had invited a high caste communist leader. Surely, he would come! "I went on my bicycle to see him and his wife answered the door. She said, 'Oh, my husband is in bed. He's not feeling well.'"

He went to another house, and was told. "Oh, we're coming."

At another house a girl told him, "My father has already left for it."

He returned to Gandhi park to tell his friends that people were on their way. "We waited until nine, ten, eleven. We waited until our hearts were empty." No one turned up. Not even the Gandhians.

At eleven, they decided to eat. The women said, "We told you it would never happen in this town."

They ate in silence, then walked their bikes home. At midnight, Satyarthi arrived at his house and was suprised to see the lights still on. The gate was open and people were sitting in the courtyard. He heard noises and was shocked to see some of his relatives there.

"You fool!" they shouted angrily when they saw him. "You fool! With your nonsense!"

"I haven't committed any crime!" he yelled back. "It is you people here who have committed a crime by perpetuating this terrible inhumanity."

The argument grew more and more heated, until threats of "social boycott" -- one of the most severe punishments in Indian society -- began to be uttered. Satyarthi was the youngest of five children. His brothers pleaded: Don't punish the family for something Kailash did on his own. Elders said he would have to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Ganges, shave his head, organize a feast for 100 high caste people and undergo a cleansing ritual.

"Okay, okay, he will do it," his brothers said.

Satyarthi refused. "I am not a sinner," he said. "And you cannot outcast me. I will outcast you! I will not have any relations with any of you any longer!"

His mother and sisters-in-law, fearful of the social boycott, were begging, "Please, please, Kailash, please take a holy bath."

Eventually tempers cooled and a compromise was made: Kailash must never again enter the kitchen, or touch the water source, or eat with the family.

For the remainder of his teenage years, he ate alone in his room.

In time, people died and memories faded and Satyarthi was once again permitted to enter the kitchen, but the incident continued to burn inside.

"I learnt that if you challenge something," he told me, "you should be prepared for the reaction."

In February 2000, thirty-one years later, I traveled by train with Satyarthi to Chandigarh, five hours north of Delhi, where SACCS had recently freed ten bonded laborers, members of an indigenous tribe, the Bhil, who had spent their entire lives working in mines and quarries without pay. Even after all the years, Satyarthi still attends these events to keep the pressure on state governments.

The Bhil adults appeared to be in their late twenties or thirties; they wrapped themselves in shawls and peered at the crowd of journalists through haunted, flinching eyes, as if they expected to be punched in the face at any moment. They couldn't read or write; they didn't understand Hindi or English; many of them had never been more than a few miles from the quarries, and prior to their release, never out of range of armed guards, even when they went into the fields to defecate. One journalist told me that that they didn't know that they lived in a country called India.

Satyarthi and his colleague, Jai Singh, an untouchable, gave a series of interviews. Satyarthi was very much the showman. Tall and handsome, with a salt-and-pepper beard, dressed in a crisp white punjabi, brown vest, and cream colored shawl -- all hand woven in Gandhian tradition -- he towered dramatically over the Bhil laborers. He reminded me of Gary Cooper riding into town to save the day. He told the press that the man who had enslaved these people was a well-known figure in the state, with senior government connections. It was known that the local government had let him get away scot free for years, even though indentured labor had been illegal in India since 1976. They would do everything to see that he was punished. In the meantime, other Bhil were being held, including relatives. They had to be freed and immediately reunited with their families, then rehabilitated and repatriated to their home region in the state of Gujarat.

Reflecting on Satyarthi's interview a year later, what stays with me is the look he had in his eyes while he was speaking about the injustices the Bhil had faced. He was very serious and yet there was something peaceful about him, as well, as if he understood that he was doing precisely what he was on earth to be doing.

I could picture him questioning the cobbler and arguing with his uncles. He'd learned from his miscalculations. He was surrounded by TV cameras, journalists and photographers. Never again would he throw a party and have nobody attend. People paid attention to SACCS across the country and across the world. And watching this obsessive, theatrical, radically principled man, I thought: What good fortune for others that this is how he derives satisfaction in life.

"I love this work," Satyarthi said on the train home. "I could not live without it."