Our idea was to go to aid-funded schools and government schools (which are subsidised for the benefit of those who cannot afford the fees of private schools), and identify a few talented children.

We would then get one of India's leading authors to mentor them over video calls and help them to jointly write a story.

The story (called Udaan) would be unveiled by the author at the famous Jaipur Literature Festival, the world's largest free literature festival. The cute 7 year olds would join him on stage through holographic teleportation and tell their parts of the story to the audience. It would be a one-of-a-kind book launch - giving the children's story the biggest launch platform. And so we set out to create an event which could turn five underprivileged children into published authors, and become a source of inspiration for thousands of their schoolmates.

The execution was done in several phases.

In the first phase we reached out to schools for underprivileged children, and conduct writing workshops to select bright young potential storytellers. This was done in October-November 2015.

The selected children were introduced to the author Amish Tripathi over talked with them over Skype calls, and told them the first chapter of a story he wanted to write with them. The story travelled from one child to another, as each of them wrote one chapter of the book. The story was ready in January, and then an artist illustrated the pages in tune with the children's imagination.

The book was printed, and Amish Tripathi launched it at the Jaipur Litfest on January 24, 2016. The printed book was distributed at the schools and in the villages the children hail from, and also through Airtel offices and employees.

The Udaan project generated 67 million impressions, including over 3 million views of the video on YouTube in the first week alone. 99% conversations generated by the book and its video have been positive for Airtel.

The story was picked up by Huffington Post, Storypick, Mashable and many other websites, and the book itself elicited interest from publishers like Pratham Books and worldreader.org.

While there was no sales objective linked with the exercise, the Udaan project earned massive positive word-of-mouth for Airtel.

Customers have lauded the initiative as warm and emotionally touching, and over 25000 people have written about it on Twitter and Facebook.

At the micro-level, the most heart-warming achievement has been the change in the lives of the five children. Having become published authors, they are treated like heroes in their local communities and are an inspiration for their classmates.