PANCHAAMRITAM 295
(pancha is five in
samskritam; amritam is nectar)
Amavaasya /
Kali Yugabda 5117 / Manmatha Panguni 25 (April 7, 2016)
ONE
26
infants were evacuated safely after a fire broke out at a district general
hospital in Kalaburagi (Karnataka, Bharat) March 23, 2016. The fire was
triggered by a short-circuit in an air-conditioner in the infants emergency
ward (NICU) of the district hospital. Thanks to presence of mind shown by
employees at the hospital, no lives were lost. One of the hospital employees,
Fakirappa, immediately broke open the glass door and windows with his bare
hands, and with the support of nurses, parents, and other people present,
immediately brought all the 26 newborn infants out of the emergency ward. The
children would have otherwise faced high risk of getting suffocated. The
incident took place during the lunch break, it is said. The presence of mind of
the two male nurses and a medical attendant in the Dental wing in the hospital
saved the day for the authorities. The trio did not wait for instructions,
rushed to the ward and started breaking the windows in the air-tight NICU ward,
allowing the smoke, which had engulfed the room to escape and saved the lives
of the infants. (Based on media reports including one by THE HINDU, March
24, 2016).
TWO
I
tried making sense of it (RSS role) walking the familiar old Brahmaputra
promenade, the river on the left and on the right the zone that formed the
epicentre of the Assam movement. I retraced my steps to the tiny Shukreshwar
Temple astride the embankment. Like other reporters then, I would climb these
steps often to meet a single man with a mysterious half-smile. Kumud Narayan
Sarma, whose family had hereditary control of the temple, was dean of the law
faculty at Gauhati University (Assam, Bharat) and lived in its one-room
outhouse. His fame came not from his scholarship but from the power of his
favourite “students”, the leaders of AASU, to whom he was formally an advisor.
Everybody agreed there was something intriguing about AASU’s key interlocutor,
who left Home Minister Zail Singh infuriated with his talk-talk/fight-fight
approach. I could never say so conclusively, but there was much to him that
suggested a deep RSS connection, beginning with his utterly spartan lifestyle
in the compound of his little old temple, and the understated suppleness with
which he handled his enormous power. He, along with his wards, was also
incorruptible, which Zail Singh and his spooks complained about most of all. From a column by Shri Shekhar Gupta in
BUSINESS STANDARD April 8, 2016 (http://www.business-standard.com/article/opinion/shekhar-gupta-assam-s-35-year-saffronisation-116040800961_1.html).
THREE
Meet
Shri Natarajan, a retired bank official. Unlike most retirees, he travels 50
kilometres to attend to his ‘Samajam’
work early in the day. Probably ‘Chennapuri Annadaana Samajam’ is the only
organisation in India involved uninterruptedly for over 125 years in
annadaanam. Mugalur Kannaiya Chetty born in a poor family in 1863 was saddened
at the sight of numerous people starving as he walked to his school. After he
was employed, he set aside four ‘annas’ (25 paise) from his first salary. Some
of his colleagues too pitched in with contributions ranging from quarter of an
anna to one anna and it all added up to three rupees. He deposited the amount with
a hotel owner with a request to provide one time meal for 12 adults and 6 kids
among the poor for one month – preference was to be shown to the disabled and
the blind. The first meal was served on March 11, 1889. Later Kannaiya Chetty arranged for twice a day
feeding. In the course of one year, the number of beneficiaries grew to 300. A
philanthropist by name Krishnadas donated his two storey building on Nainiappa
Naicken Street in Park Town of Chennai (Tamilnadu, Bharat) for those poor to
sit and take food. It is this building that witnessed the annadaanam for over
125 years. When Swami Vivekananda visited Chennai, he said that it was the
place where he must have his food. He came to the samajam, sat with the poor,
partook of the meal served there and blessed the Samajam team. Shri
Udayshankar, the present secretary of the Samajam, is a retired bank official
like Natarajan (Mobile: 9884186834.),
one of the directors there. (Based on a report by Shri L.
Murugaraj in DINAMALAR, September 9, 2015).
FOUR
In
2008, a farmer in the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra committed suicide. He was
survived by his wife, four children, and his very old father. Three of the four
children were girls. The eldest daughter, Deepa, was 14 at the time. Sapna was
11, and Swati was about 7 years old. The family was thoroughly shaken by their
loss. Today, Deepa is 22 years old and is working in a hospital after finishing
her diploma in nursing. Sapna recently completed the same and Swati is in the
second year of a BSc Yoga Education course in Bengaluru. They are educated,
confident, and completely aware of how they want to plan their futures. The one
person who made it all possible for them is Shri Ajeet Saxena, who is currently
posted as the Chief Commercial Manager of Southern Railways in Chennai
(Tamilnadu, Bharat) – a man who refers to these three girls and 200 other
children from the region as his own. He
took 10 days of leave from work and headed to Vidarbha. There, with the help of
some volunteers of the Sarvodaya Movement in Sevagram village, he met 29
families of farmers in about 15 villages. “After seeing these girls for the first time,
I sat inside their hut and cried, thinking of what would happen to them. They
had nothing to look forward to,” he says. Ajeet returned to Chennai after
giving the farmers his phone number and asking them to call him in case they
felt depressed. Being a regular speaker on spirituality, he addressed many
people in a Rotary Club in Chennai, a few days after he returned. Many came
forward asking what they could do to help. He opened bank accounts in the
villages for some of these children (Based on a report by Smt Tanaya Singh
in http://www.thebetterindia.com/50248/ajeet-saxena, April 4, 2016).
FIVE
Today, Srikanth Bolla is the CEO of
Hyderabad-based Bollant Industries, a company with a turnover of around Rs 10
crore that employs uneducated and physically challenged people to manufacture
eco-friendly, disposable consumer packaging solutions out of natural leaf and
recycled paper. 24 years ago Bolla was born sightless in a remote village (Andhra
Pradesh, Bharat). In 2012, after graduating from Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT), he launched Bollant Industries. The company now has around
450 employees, 60 per cent of whom are differently-abled. Life, he says, has
taught him many lessons. Compassion is one of them. “Compassion,” he says, “is
not about giving a coin to a beggar at the traffic signal. It’s showing
somebody the way to live and giving them the opportunity to thrive.” The world
looked at him and said you can do nothing, says Bolla. “But I look up at the
world and say I can do anything." (Based on a report by
Shri T E
Narasimhan and Shri Gireesh Babu in
BUSINESS STANDARD, April 2, 2016).
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