1.40am, we received the first call. Within 20 minutes, our website crashed.
"At 12.30pm, our telephone lines were jammed and the number of missed calls started piling up. By 1.30pm or so, we had 8,600 missed calls." By 4pm, AA centres across India had received 13,000 calls. By 7pm when the episode was telecast again, it had jumped to 28,000. At the time of going to press, 31,000 calls were recorded.
Alcoholics Anonymous is a fellowship of recovering alcoholics who follow the universally accepted 12-step program to rid themselves of the addiction.
"After a lot of groundwork, the show's research team concluded that this programme is the only reliable recovery service for alcoholism available across the country at free of cost," Gyaneshwar, general manager, AA India, said.
At present, there are 1,100 groups with 30,000 members registered for de-addiction. But members say this is a small proportion of the actual number of alcoholics suffering because they do not know of a recovery programme that works.
AA India refused to be featured as a sponsored charity because the fellowship, in principle, does not accept donations from outside sources. Members of the fellowship fund all AA activities, said the chairman, public information, AA India. "We will pool in our own resources to reach out to alcoholics across the country." Alcoholics Anonymous has members from all strata of the society.
Members feel the show's biggest contribution would be awareness that alcoholism is a full-fledged disease that can be cured. Elated over the tremendous response, AA members in the city are geared up for a busy week. Since the episode will be aired 14 times in eight languages in the coming week, calls are expected to keep pouring in.
(For a serialised version of AA's Big Book, pick up a copy of DNA every Tuesday)