Open your eyes and heart.

' Charity begins at home 'is a saying everyone has heard but only a few have had the opportunity to witness. In my opinion in the layman's point of view charity is giving alms to the beggar at the streetlight or to the ones who come knocking at your door on festivals or giving your old clothes to servants or even to giving sums of money to a charitable organization.

Have you ever seen people who regard charity as a way of life? Have you seen people who open their homes and hearts to orphans? Have you seen people who give not days or months but years of their life and their families to help the needy?

I had the opportunity to observe such selfless people tonight. And believe me it makes one look puny and selfish. Here were people who sacrifice pleasures and comforts to give others a better life.

So many of us have at various stages have been lectured about the importance of helping those who cant help themselves. Whatever be the religion or faith charity is paramount and that's what makes the faith a humanitarian one. We feel good about ourselves if we help old ladies or give ten rupees to a beggar on the road on a Friday but really what is the big deal about that.

Putting money on the table only goes so far and is only a secondary issue. Something that smoothens the way. It is the personal touch, the effort that does it. An organization run near my house is home to 87 orphans who are taken care of from childhood until they get married. They are educated in whatever field they want ,they are dressed well and fed well. They are well mannered, educated and I noticed even happy. The organization gives zakat to about 1500 people every year. A large amount of grains,sugar,oils etc. The people who run it have no qualms about accepting their extended family.

What are we doing? Nobody needs the money. It is the time. It made me think about what I was doing. How sad that I was living only for myself. Look at those who feel ashamed to live for themselves. How sad to have come in to this world and not to have touched a single life while you were here. How sad to not have shared your bounty with your neighbor. How sad to have never risen above our own existence.

A different flavour..

Meals are one of the accepted forms of socializing among mankind. Since yore meals have been looked upon as an announcement of brotherhood and sharing a meal or feeding someone taken as confirmation of friendship. Food and company both being some of the most primitive needs of man , we have found a way to blend them and enjoy both at the same time.

In almost every possible situation that revolves around food I am fairly correct except for one exception. And that refers to the meals I share with my jamaat sisters( cant think of another word). We have been sitting together at the same place for about 4 years now and I still cant tell you the names of each and everyone. Of course I am quite familiar by now with their eating habits but have never come around to asking their names. I know a few just not all.

Every meal starts like this. First my friends and I encounter faces which question our presence yet again among them. Then begins the silent meal , in case I am alone, the slow partaking of food, the study of the dirty linen, the secret study of the girls in front of me and the the now-almost-perfect-facade of pretending I am not bored.

I suppose it would be wrong to put the whole blame squarely upon them. They are just different. Being different is not bad , its just that they are a different that we cant reconcile ourselves with and vice verse.

It is ironical that we cant form relations with the very people we share the closest bonds with. It brings to mind a line I read somewhere- You dont find friends, you make them. And it seems we are not ready to make friends just yet.

Holiday Cheer

Well here I am again drumming my fingers on the keyboard wondering what topic under the sun can be stretched out enough to make an entry in my blog. Gosh for someone who can talk as much as me I dont have a topic. So how do the silent souls do it? Does it come bursting out onto the relatively safer medium of paper than the trecherous form of speech? Maybe I will ask mom about that , having no experience of being a quiet person myself. Hehe.

It is so funny sometimes how Fate has put such different persons under one roof? Or maybe thats the beauty of it. If all of us were alike we would just drive each other crazy. Very likely indeed. A little example can be how we view our sunday. Dad deems it to be a day when he can go and meet people he has not seen for a month or so. Mom announces it to be a the day when all pending house work shall be finished. Bhai sees it in his calender as another day gone from his stock of days of study. While I view it as a day to catch a couple of movies in the least. Yes sometimes its a mess sorting out what we should be doing.

But what is it about holidays that makes them so coveted? Is it the pleasure of having no demands on your time? Or the selfish instinct to give in to your lazyness. Whatever it might be holidays make no sense until they come in between work. Its only when you know how amazing it is to put up your aching feet or straighten your back for a while does the thought of a holiday make sense. By the way I remember reading in an issue of the Reader's digest long ago about how they was a time when the government had to make holidays a compulsary affair. In fact working on a sunday was made a punishable crime.

Now how would that sound? " My lord Mr. So and So should be punished for his henious crime of daring to sell shoes on Jan 12 a SUNDAY!!!!

Cure

You know this is supposed to be getting easier. This writing of thoughts, upon a whim. But it's clearly not. Sometimes i think this inspiration to write is like a cold. It strikes you at the time when you do not need it as an excuse nor is it a convenient time to be in bed. And when you are really hoping for one so you can pretend to be sick, you never get it.

A question to answer.

Hello there.

I was just thinking about what to write on my blog , which should actually not be so hard since its my personal diary sort of thing and I can scribble absolutely anything and the reader would be forced to read it in the hope that I will eventually get to the point after the half page of rambling. Hahahah. That's why the pen is mightier than the sword. It bends you as per the writer's will without the slightest hint of threat.

But then there is an inside story too. I wonder if our bestselling authors sit and ponder over their words for hours or days at end wondering what others will think about it, whether it is worth saying or not? Or is it that it just flows out from the end of their pens, from their minds into physical form seamlessly? What is it that makes them write? What is it that inspires them? Do they all have terrible personal lives which they draw upon as a reservoir and write those stories which make you weep? Or is it that the philosophical writers are individuals who might have been forced in their youth or their formative years to sit in one corner and think?

Why talk of only authors? Do excellent business rise from bed one day and say today I will push my net worth to over a million? Or do athletes join the Olympics on a whim and voila they have a medal? And to top it all does it comes to them just like that?

I don't know. And I suppose not. It is probably something which exists inside them and when rubbed and polished it shines from within. Micheal Phelps comes to mind at this point. What talent that was ,that the world was left with their mouths agape. Watching the news this evening I could not help but look up to Ratan Tata. What a man! I cant help admire the dignity, the poise, the quiet authority and the razor mind. Not to forget he is the man who said- A Promise is a Promise.

Thousands of brilliant men and women have passed through the times , each ones feat no less than the other. I only talk of those I know. And I wish there could be some way we could preserve and reuse such greatness of character again.

A thought comes to mind- Is there a limited supply of greatness? Or it that a spark or a granule lives inside each one of us? Is the big secret only that those people have been able to forge their inner ores and make fine steel out of it through hard work, perseverance, foresight and a desire, are the ones who have been luckily born into the elite club of super acheivors? And the rest of the populace has been given nothing but doomed to a life of serving as cogs in a bigger machine?

On the other hand what if all of us too have that 'light' inside us and we with our own hand snuff it out due to inner and outer circumstances? Isn't is scarier to think that all of us are vessels to a kind of talent but fail to recognize it and use. We might just be passing through life on the assumption that we are not what heroes are made of . And forever waste that opportunity of being somebody and doing something.