A Stranger Truth: Lessons In Love | Leadership And Courage Fr

When Ashok Alexander left a high-profile corporate job to head Avahan | the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's programme to stem the growth of the HIV epidemic in India | he was plunged into an India far removed from the comfort zones he had lived and worked in all his life. It was a grinding place where women sold themselves for fifty rupees and fourteen-year-olds injected drugs. It was the shadow world of transgenders and of young gay men in a country that still criminalized same-sex love. It was the strange world of truckers | lonely journeymen along forgotten highways. Above all | it was a place where valiant battles for a barely decent life were being fought every day. During the ten years Alexander built Avahan | it grew to become one of the largest and most successful HIV prevention programmes in the world | credited with averting over 6. 5 lakh new infections. Based on his experiences | A Stranger Truth compellingly brings alive the world of people most vulnerable to HIV/AIDS | and some of the unlikely heroes among them. ]