We all have ambitions and dreams, and our effort is drawn towards fulfilling them. While some take time to identify what they want to pursue, there are others who know it at a very young age. Actor turned humanitarian Somy Ali, who now runs her NGO, No More Tears, talks about how and when she realised her true calling.
“I began dreaming of what I was truly passionate about at a very young age. Majority of that thought process stemmed from the environment I was brought up in as well as the poverty I witnessed as a child growing up in Pakistan. I would always wonder and couldn’t comprehend why my parents and I lived in a 28 bedroom 3-storey house, while there were countless children, women and men sleeping on the pavement. I must have been seven years old at the time when I sneaked four young Afghani refugee girls into our home and hid them in my cupboard in my room for a few days and would secretly feed them, let them live there and even played with them with my toys. They couldn’t have been more than six or seven years old themselves. It was when my father found out and told them that they had to leave, I was so angry with him even though he sat me down as I cried profusely explaining to my dad that they were my new friends and they didn’t have a house to sleep in. But my father did not listen and tried to shove some rationale into my little brain of a spoiled and extremely stubborn child. I could not understand and was in total defiance of my dad’s decision to have them leave,” she recalls.
Somy, however, made sure that her father gave them money and bags full of my toys. “Sometimes I wonder what must have become of them as they got older and if they made it through the harshness that comes with living a life on the streets. This is when I truly believe my true calling in life was born, the minute I began questioning anything and everything that did not make sense nor seem fair to me or if anyone else was treated unjustifiably,” she adds.
Even though serving humanity and those in need was what she always wanted to do, coming to Mumbai to meet her heartthrob was also something she cherished as a teenager. Hence, she did take the leap of faith before leaving everything behind and moving back to the US.
“Well, my career in India was a fantastic fluke given I didn’t go there to act in movies and neither did I have the slightest interest in doing so. My real career began in 2007 when I initiated No More Tears with a mission to rescue and empower victims of human trafficking and domestic violence. I ended working with all the police departments and the FBI to rescue several sex/labour trafficking victims brought to the US from India under the guise of marriage or a promise of a job which did not actually exist. These young girls and even boys were sold to traffickers and then there were many women who were brought here from South Asia and the Middle East through arranged or love marriages who ended up being verbally and physically abused. Given I was extremely privy to that kind of setting growing up and myself having lived in a domestic violence relationship for almost nine years during my time in India, I used that knowledge to help these victims get out of those situations and empower them,” she says.
