A teacher’s essential job is to help children. One thing that always stayed on the back of my mind was that I was paid a lot more than I deserved for my work as a physical education teacher. I used to have only 2-3 classes in a day and I didn't consider that much work at all. So, letting these kids play football, giving them this opportunity also helped me ease this dilemma that I faced. It felt like that I was finally giving something back to the society. Giving these kids these one or two hours of happiness meant everything to me.

Coming back to when the kids from the adjoining area played for the first time, a lot of things came to my mind after that game. During and at the end of the game, I saw the children enjoying this game a lot and that’s when I thought about organizing a slum football tournament. At first when I went to the journalists, many of them didn’t think it would work but still they published about it when I insisted.

I still remember 128 teams registered for the first tournament. The problems didn’t end there though, the football association didn’t agree to give referees for the match. They said that all of this was for drama, publicity, politics and many other things. I didn’t listen to them and went ahead with the plan because I just wanted to help these kids and the society. I got some of the workers from the college to be the referees and told them when they had to blow the whistle during the game.
I changed some of the rules, I didn’t let there be the offside rule as it might’ve led to fights among the kids. These kids wouldn’t have had the money to buy shoes, so I told them to play barefooted. There was no proper dress code or team kits. One team would wear their shirts and the other team wouldn’t. The Slum Soccer you see in the movie Jhund, this is how it started out in 2001.