When Kumulu Kirsani, a tribal teenager, fell seriously ill on a dull grey morning on September 17, 2019, all the ills that keep Odisha’s Malkangiri district backward seemed to conspire against him.…
-
-
Harakchand Sawla: Charity begins on the footpath
A young man in his twenties used to stand on the footpath opposite the famous Tata Cancer Hospital (Tata Memorial Centre) at Mumbai and stare at the crowd in front of him…
-
Life is baeutiful
Do you remember the name of your kindergarten teacher? I do, mine. Her name was Mrs. White. And I remember thinking she must be some older relation of Walt Disney’s Snow White,…
-
The good samaritan
A teacher of the Law once came up and tried to trap Jesus Christ. “Teacher,” he asked Jesus, “What must I do to receive eternal life?” Jesus answered him, “What do the…
-
How to deal with insults: The way of the Buddha
One day, the Buddha was walking through a village teaching Dhamma, when a very angry and rude young man belonging to another group of believers came up to him and began insulting…
-
The wet pants
There was a nine-year-old kid sitting at his school desk and all of a sudden, there was a puddle between his feet and the front of his pants got wet too. He…
-
The old fisherman
Our house was directly across the street from the entrance of a popular hospital in the city. We lived downstairs and rented the upstairs rooms to out-patients at the clinic. One summer…
-
‘Dear teenage boy at the skate park’
A visit to the local skate park took an unexpected turn for a mother and her little girl. The mother of a little girl aspiring to be a skateboarder has posted a…
-
Erik Weihenmayer: Blind to failure
Scaling Mount Everest requires the enthusiasm and boosterism of a physical-education teacher combined with the survival instinct of a Green Beret. You have to want that summit. Erik Weihenmayer, 33, wasn’t just…
-
Night and day
Rabbi Isadore was a wise teacher. A student asked, “How is one to know the precise time when night ends and day begins?” One student volunteered, “It is when one can distinguish…