“Do you know how an oyster makes his shell?”
“No. Do you?”
“Me neither. But I know why a snail carries its house on its back."
"Why?" "
So that he always has a roof over his head"
A
smile on your lips is nowadays difficult to play by, leave alone making an
extra effort to make someone else smile. In a world plagued with concerns over
Ebola or the growing unrest in the middle-east, one would not hesitate to
second such an opinion. After a couple of years as an undergraduate student and
a year as an “adult” by now, it comes to me as a great surprise that I should
feel content and ecstatic on a day that is completely aloof from my age and
activities. A day I celebrated for the first time of my life as the Children’s
day.
While
I was stuffing my bag along with Zinya and Tarun, I never realized that I was
filing it not with crayons and colors but with expectations, expectations of
the kids we have so grown fond of. The day indeed matured as colorful and as beautiful
as the greeting cards and clay models the young artists had designed, the best
out of waste was not the creative things they did with junk around them, but
what they did with my day, they made it “best out of waste” indeed!!
It
was high school all over again as I nearly was an object of fist fight yet
again as Dilip (a 7th class kid) declared that I was his best friend,
but to Ranjith (another 7th class kid) the statement did not sound
pleasing and spoke he his own disposition, my best efforts to make him
understand that I was the best friend of both Ranjith and Dilip was in vain,
because he strongly believed that one person must be entitled to only one best
friend! Finally, the matter was amicably resolved when Ranjith reluctantly settled
for Tarun’s pitch to be his best friend.
The motivation towards volunteering
for the NoteBook Drive was my own attitude that a practical interest in
educating the children of our country should be one of the elementary
obligations that must devolve on every thinking man in India and so, it began. This
social activity for me is not a display of sentimental charity, which is
ridiculous and useless, but an attempt to perpetuate the elimination of
fundamental deficiency in our economy and society, a deficiency that is
bringing about the degradation of our country.
But, now what makes me volunteer is
not my philosophy but a new relationship that I have developed. A relationship
with no demands, a relationship that has made me realize that that I may not be
widely loved but I am loved deeply. A relationship that calls me home, where I
know I am always expected.
