Couple use Twitter to rescue newborn girl abandoned on Indian garbage dump
17 June 2019
(CNN)Vinod Kapri, an Indian filmmaker based in New Delhi, checks Twitter first thing every morning -- like virtually every journalist on the planet.
On Friday, something amid the relentless stream of content caught his attention: a graphic video of a newborn baby, who was left abandoned on a garbage dump, naked and wailing.
Almost moved to tears, Kapri showed the video to his wife Sakshi Joshi, who is also a journalist. "We were very upset," Kapri told CNN. "I couldn't watch the whole video -- I could hear her crying and that was enough," Joshi said.
Both immediately knew what to do. "Our conversation suddenly shifted to: 'We should adopt her," Joshi added.
So Joshi tweeted a request to her followers to send over any information they could find about the baby, saying she and Kapri wanted to adopt her if they could locate her.
"We had no idea of the location of the video or its authenticity," Kapri said. "We see many fake videos of babies on social media."
In a couple of hours, Joshi's tweet -- and her husband's following post in English -- went viral, with hundreds of netizens searching for clues that could allow the couple to locate the girl.
"Everybody on Twitter was keen to find the girl," Joshi said. "Twitter had the biggest role in the whole story."
"Everybody has (their) own ideology and opinions, but this was beyond ideology. It shows that humanity still exists, calling to everyone in this world," she added.
Thanks also to their journalistic sources, the couple started to get some leads that the girl was found in Rajasthan.
So Kapri asked one of his former colleagues and friend, Rahul Choudhry, to go and find her "on a personal level."
Choudhry found out the baby girl had been admitted in a serious condition to the Jawaharlal Nehru Government Hospital in the city of Nagaur. He visited the facility and sent a video of her to Kapri, who immediately tweeted it to his followers.
"Then we had a long chat with the doctor and we told him we had the intention of adopting the baby. Even though we're not legal parents, we already felt emotionally connected," Kapri said.
The doctor told him that the baby was doing well and that only her weight, 1.6 kg (3.5 pounds), was cause for concern. But he invited Kapri and Joshi to come to Rahjahstan to see the baby.
So on Saturday, the couple drove 500 kilometers (311 miles) to Nagaur.
In the meantime, they asked their Twitter followers about the adoption process.
"We never had any intention of adopting a baby. I'm already 46," Kapri said. "We had no idea about the process. We started researching and we found out that adoption is quite tedious and long in India."
"We are both going to do our medical checkups, the application will take 2-3 more days," he added.
Once they got to the hospital, words failed them.
"I can't express my feelings ... what me and my wife felt was just beyond words, I completely lost my words. Inexplicable," he said.
And on Father's Day, Joshi tweeted a picture of the three of them together, saying: "The whole Kapri family is dying to have her in the family."
As a temporary name, Joshi and Kapri decided to call her "Pihu," which was suggested by some Twitter users.
"It's the name of a bird and a film I directed. The main character has a 2-year-old," Kapri said.
CNN has reached out to the hospital for comment.