When Hillary met the Karate kid in Kolkata

While terming her trip to Kolkata as remarkable, United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reminisced about the time when a 10-year-old girl who lives in a red light area in Bihar demonstrated her karate skills

 "I met with a group of women -- mostly Indian, some American -- who, along with some of the men who were running organisations to rescue girls from having been trafficked into prostitution -- and I met some of the girls and the young women, and their stories sounded remarkably like the ones we heard this morning," she told mediapersons in Washington.

 "So when I was introduced to a young girl, probably about 10, who had, with her mother, been rescued from a brothel, who was dressed in her karate outfit and she asked me, 'Do  you want to see me do karate'- I said, 'I really do."

Clinton said amid laughter and applause as she referred to the conversation she had with a young girl at that meeting.

"And she proceeded to perform a karate move. But it wasn't so much the karate as it was the way she stood so straight, looked me in the eye, had a sense of pride and accomplishment about her.

"And that's what we saw on this stage here, so many thousands of miles away," Clinton said narrating the experience she had with the young girl from Bihar.

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"The work that the foundation does is part of this remarkable combination of actors and institutions that we sometimes take for granted in New York and in our country.

"Many years ago, I talked about society really being a three-legged stool: You need an accountable, responsible government; you need an effective job-creating, prosperity-increasing private sectors and you need an active, dynamic civil society.

"And the civil society really fills the space that most of us live in every day - family and friendships and faith and volunteerism and all the community efforts that we are celebrating," Clinton said.

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Clinton said she tries, whenever possible, to find time to meet with women who are trying to do, often under very difficult circumstances.

"Because in places around the world, it's almost unimaginable that there could be this large room of women and men who are supporting a foundation devoted to uplift, empowering, helping, supporting, comforting women and girls as they make their journeys through life," she said.

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