Reaching Out In Small Ways

I love spending time with Sheetal bhaiyya and Khushmita, so I went to their Urban Ashram in Pune last week. Something I witnessed on my last day there moved me deeply.

The Urban Ashram was hosting a two-day workshop in community-oriented natural building, facilitated by bio-architects Merve Tekin and Mukund Iyer, whom Sheetal bhaiyya had met earlier in Turkey. Lunch was to be served to all participants on both days. The first day went off fine. Surprisingly, on the second day, we found that all the cooking gas cylinders had run out of gas.

Khushmita spent a good part of the morning checking with friends and neighbours if they could lend one of their cylinders for a couple of hours so that lunch could be cooked for the workshop participants. One of the neighbours offered hers, so Sheetal bhaiyya and I promptly went off to pick it up. That was Mridula Aunty, who lives in a nearby housing complex.

While Sheetal bhaiyya and I waited for the cylinder, she made each of us a cup of delicious almond milk. We thanked her, and were about to leave. However, we got talking about a few things, and realized that she had done something amazingly beautiful. It was a Sunday, and her family usually likes to go out to a restaurant for their Sunday dinner. That day, she asked them if they could go out for lunch instead of dinner so that the gas cylinder at home could be lent to Sheetal bhaiyya and Khushmita for the lunch preparations.

How beautiful! Later, while having lunch, we shared this story with the workshop participants as well, and their faces lit up with smiles. I was just so moved I could not help sharing the story with many others, and this blog post is a way of helping it travel further.