An old friend, Monu, who we’ve known since childhood lives on the streets of Paharganj, New Delhi. I was video calling him while he was cooking instant noodles on a fire he’d made on the street when 2 locals came out with a big kettle to give out tea.

[EDIT. Videos now below to watch.]

I asked Monu if he could make chai for the other homeless cycle rickshaw drivers there, and when he said he could, I sent him £20. When I put the videos of him brewing and giving out the tea online, some friends offered to donate.

Thanks to this generosity, Monu was able to buy food, and gradually bigger pots and pans, and he has been cooking them all hot food every day for the last 2-3 weeks.

Another old friend, Ajay, who was a homeless street kid in Delhi a decade ago but now has a wife and 2 kids in Bodh Gaya, UP state, asked if we could help him and his family. We sent him money to buy himself a month’s worth of food but he told us the villagers were also all hungry.

So we sent him some extra of the donated money to buy food for the villagers. Despite Ajay and his wife being crippled with polio, they made food parcels and took them to every family in the village.

After posting these videos online, people donated even more, despite many having lost their income since lockdown. In the last two weeks, he’s given out three sets of food parcels to the villagers.

The most important part, in some ways, is the sense of community that’s being created by Monu and Ajay thanks to everyone’s support from here. While Monu’s fellow homeless rickshaw drivers would support each other when they could, all are living on the breadline. But now, they’re all working as a team, and after starting with one small pot, between them they’ve acquired larger ones, and now a huge wok, as well as increasingly large chapati pans. Some build and tend the fire, others make and cook the chapatis, others prepare the veg or do the washing up afterwards.

Likewise, in AJ’s village, people would try to help neighbours when they could, but now AJ’s friends are helping with collecting the foodstuffs, bagging it up and giving it out. Initially he was being wheeled around the village in his hand-powered wheelchair that all Indian polio victims have, and after distributing the food parcels, he was in the middle of the village in his wheelchair, surrounded by all the kids as he gave out biscuits to all of them.

Now he’s had the extra money we’ve provided, he’s managed to buy face masks, and the mothers queue up to be given a mask to put on and keep before taking the food parcels from him. Likewise, after Monu bought a cigarette one night on the black market and I asked about getting a packet, he said it was hard because the bulk sellers had stopped. But the next day he sent a photo of 2 packs of cigarettes and a dozen packets of bidis (tiny Indian cigarettes made from a tobacco leaf) that he’d managed to buy for everybody for about £2-3 in total.

And that was the day before the BBC and other British papers reported that studies in France and China had shown that people who smoke every day are 4-5 times less likely to contract the virus. What started as a simple desire from the donors here to allow our homeless friends there to enjoy an occasional cigarette will actually be helping stop them catch and thus spread the virus.

Working as communities they are therefore able to increase the scope of the work they’re doing, with everyone helping the best they can, whether it’s bagging the food, getting bigger pots and pans or helping with the distribution or washing up. And this sense of community we’re helping engender will continue once the virus has passed. People will remember that they were there for each other during the worst of it.

We want to keep this going during lockdown. We’ve been amazed at the support we’ve had so far, and it’s making an incredible difference to the lives of many people in two different parts of India. But the more we have means the more that we can help these people now, as well as expanding the numbers of people we support and hopefully we’ll have enough to be able to continue helping some of the poorest but nicest people on the planet for a little while after the lockdown is over, as some will still find that their income source has dried up.

We’ve been friends with some of the homeless street kids of Paharganj for more than two decades. Around 2008, we went out one time and found the Salvation Army had got a small room and were cooking a hot lunch for the children every day, and they introduced us. We did what we could to get involved, and bought some things for the children such as book, pens, desks and chairs.

When we returned to the UK, we told people about this and again, some friends donated. With this we were able to provide more, including buying a computer for them, with the idea of letting them learn from Hindi YouTube videos about the natural world and the like.

The project had only meant to have had a short life span - all charities in India have over 1 billion to look after on a tiny budget. But the head of this mission, Captain William, got us an appointment with the Delhi chief of the Salvation Army, and they agreed to keep the project going for another 6 months with the money we’d had donated here.

So our connection with the homeless of that tiny corner of Paharganj, New Delhi - we all call it Lassi Corner - has gone back 20 years. Whether taking them out to eat with us in cheap local food places called dhabas, or working with other, recognised charities, or simply sending money to our friends when times are hard, or now, being able to help the homeless under lockdown when all the clients for their rickshaws have gone.

So if you can help, however large or small, please do. Around £6 will pay for a hot meal for Monu’s group of homeless friends in Delhi. £60 pays for a set of food parcels for Ajay’s entire village of Bodh Gaya in UP state. But any amount will help. Thanks to the hard work of Monu and AJ and the ever so generous support of people here in Blighty and elsewhere in Europe, we’ve been feeding people for three weeks and would love to be able to keep going.

And please, even if you can’t help financially, remember that sharing this page could be just as helpful as a donation. Also, simple messages of support on Facebook have meant the world to Monu and Ajay so if you can leave them messages here, it will be just as valuable as they’ll know they have new friends on the other side of the world who care about them by reminding them they’re not alone.