Ice Bucket Challenge is also known as ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. In this activity, one discards the bucket full of ice water on anothers head to encourage and promote the consciousness of disease ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis) and thus promoting donations to research. This ice bucket challenge became famous and viral during July-August 2014. It has become famous in UK, US and now in India also. In US, people participate in this challenge for ALS association while in UK some people participate for Motor Neuron Disease (MND) Association. Instead of this, some people prefer to donate their money by Ice Bucket Challenge to other organizations.
History of Ice Bucket Challenge
This ice bucket challenge became famous after Pete Frates, former base ball player of Boston college when he was diagnosed with ALS in 2012 and he used the campaign to raise the awareness about his condition that he was nominating himself for the ice bucket challenge because he could and when he did, a no. of people followed this.
Firstly, Governor Chris Christie did this and uploaded his film on social media. On social media, he challenged Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of facebook. He accepted the challenge and then he challenged Bill Gates, Sheryl Sandberg & Reed Hastings.
ALS is a progressive neuro-degenerative disease which affects the nerve cells in the spinal cord and brain. This disease is 100% fatal and people suffering from this disorder eventually loses the control of voluntary muscle movement and progressively loses the ability to walk, speak, eat and breathe also.
Now this challenge has been spread like wildfire on the interwebs and people all over the world even people with big names also like Justin Timberlake, Matt Lauer & Dick Costolo are posting and sharing their videos of pouring ice cold water on their head to promote the awareness of ALS.
The rule of this activity is that within 24 hours of being challenged, the participants have to make a video with continuous footage. First of all, they have to announce their acceptance of the challenge by pouring ice in the bucket water and then have to pour the bucket water on the head. After completing the challenge, the participants can nominate other people for this challenge. Either people choose to do the task or to donate the money or both, it depends on them.
According to ALS Association, since the ice bucket challenge has become viral, there is abut 1000% spike in the donations and within a short period of time the donation reached upto $160,000 from $14,480. Another benefit is the people who never heard about this disease are now involved in the fight to find the treatments and cure for ALS.
Some of the examples of people in India who took ice bucket challenge are Bipasha Basu, Sunny Leone, Sonakshi Sinha, Abhishek Bachhan, Honey Singh, Mandira Bedi, Ritiesh Deshmukh, Siddhartha Malhotra and he nominated Arjun Kapoor, Varun Dhawan & Mohit Suri. Poonam Pandey also took the challenge and nominated Shahrukh Khan, Salman Khan, Aamir Khan.
