Actress Shilpa Shetty with an AIDS patient at an event in Delhi to mark World AIDS Day. Picture by Prem Singh

New Delhi, Dec. 1: It may not be the next Motorcycle Diaries, but Shabana Abdul Razzak Sheikh and her 250cc hired bike have seen their share of excitement.

The 19-year-old college student was in the middle of a heated argument with some men when she saw a bus go up in flames.

Still on the outskirts of Solapur, her hometown, and scared out of her wits, she contemplated going back home.

Campaigning for AIDS awareness and against violence inflicted on women, Shabana — a student of Solapur University — was not prepared for violence.

“I wanted to go back, but then I saw my friends.” So she decided to carry on.

As large parts of Maharashtra burned in protest against the desecration of a statue of B.R. Ambedkar in Kanpur, eight young women were on motorbikes, spreading awareness on the domestic violence bill and AIDS.

The women — all between 18 and 25 — had undergone a training programme with an NGO on preventing AIDS and had planned their trip to share their knowledge with other youths in the state.

They had no idea that the excitement of a unique road trip of close to 1,000 km, across five districts of Maharashtra, would soon turn into fear.

“If any one of us got scared in the middle — vehicles were being set alight and rumours were spreading fast — the rest would just continue,” said Shinge Tishya, a 21-year-old second year BSc student.

That way, fear of being left alone would make the scared one get back on the bike.

Although their bikes weren’t fancy, their plans were lofty. “We had decided, irrespective of what happened, we would cover the entire route we had decided on and would stop at each school or college on the way,” Shabana said.

The girls started from Pune on November 25 and travelled through Ahmednagar, Usmanabad, Parbani and Solapur before reaching Mumbai today.

On the way, they handed out pamphlets and discussed things with people often “surprised” to find women emerge from behind the helmets.

As they neared their destination, the girls faced a difficult choice when they saw a mob attack two policemen at Khar Ghar, a Mumbai suburb.

“Were we to have intervened, we may have been attacked, too. We just moved to the side of the road and hid from the mob,” said Shinge.

Once they were sure the policemen had been left unharmed, the girls moved on.

Unknown to them, in Delhi, some 200 students from Delhi University and JNU today met the President to seek funds for AIDS awareness programmes.

“We were assured by the President that he would ask each MP to allocate a part of his/her MP funds for AIDS awareness,” DU students’ union joint secretary Shashi Kant said.