Population deals with the most delicate of human relationships the act of love, the family and the mystery the surrounds

it...how do you tell people how many children to have and not invade people's privacy or upset their values? The population

also means increasing the value of each birth; it means guaranteeing that our children are given the fullest opportunity to

be educated, to get good health care, to have access to the jobs that they eventually want. I think population and

development go hand in hand.

These two key aspects of the thinking of Rafael Salas of the United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA)

started me on the search and journey which eventually resulted in this book. But, initially, when the UNFPA asked me to

explore the nature of the population problem in India, I was, to put it mildly, staggered. How does one tell the story of a

Salas writes, one man is a person, a thousand are a community, and a million are a statistic. I decided finally to write

something that wouldn't reinforce the statistics that make India's millions but would look instead for the faces behind the

figures. As each face becomes a person, numbers cease being an abstraction. Written by one among the numbers, it is a

story that has moved outward from a core that is integral and become a statistic? As an attempt to understand a condition

that is shared.

with the panache of a civil servant and the veiled stoicism of a Buddhist monk. I thank him and his staff in New

York and New Delhi for their generous assistance that gave me the freedom to move around and write.