If he can see God in his Blind parents, then why can't I?

I was enjoying my college life, doing BC at coffee shop, watching movies and series of TV serials, playing games, visiting home after every two months and making plans for the next visit during classes. Then one day, one of my friends asked me to come to the Samvedana presentation. I was not interested in going, but don’t know which force inside pushed me and on the given day, I found myself in room no. 119 at 3:00pm.

The idea of giving web presence to NGOs was interesting. Even collecting money from students and funneling it towards providing resources to the needy sounded good. So I joined Samvedana. Over the next few days, me and my friends visited a few NGOs for our Webpage project. And well, we were in for some hard facts.

I found that my parents in one of the Old Age Homes did not have enough food even for 3 meals of rice and pickle a day when I had multiple options to eat at any time of the day. That 30 to 35 of my brothers were sharing a room hardly three times the size of my hostel room when I didn’t even like to share my room with one person.

I could observe many such things. These made me think about ways of helping these people. Samvedana had provided the platform and I wished to devote my time to it, but at the same time I was not willing to leave the company of my friends, to sacrifice doing BC with them.

After giving a bit of thought on the whole issue, I came up with a very good solution. Why was I being so narrow-minded and restricting myself to my friends? My friends could also join me and we all could together enjoy our time with the children there in the orphanage, or with our old parents in the old age home. We could together collect the money and go for shopping to buy the resources we wanted to donate!

This was a bit tiring as compared to sitting at Coffee Shop, but then weren't we doing this for our own brothers, sisters and parents? Also, this thought inspired me that if my friends (who had taken the initiative of Samvedana) could do this, then why couldn’t I? I definitely could devote at least some time from my day to bring a smile on someone’s face!

Finally, all this resulted in the final guiding thought:

“If Shravan Kumar could see God in his blind parents, then why can't I?”

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(The author wishes not to disclose his identity)