FEEDING THE MENTALLY CHALLENGED

FEEDING THE MENTALLY CHALLENGED

http://www.akshayatrust.org/

I don't feed beggars. They can look after themselves. The mentally ill won't ask anyone for food or money,' says N Krishnan who has been feeding them thrice a day for the past seven years.


 

Left 5-star job to feed the mentally ill 


N Krishnan feeds 400 mentally ill people on the streets of Madurai three times a day, every day, all 365 days of the year. 


The 28-year-old has been doing this for seven years via a charity called the Akshaya Trust.

A look into the kitchen reveals a spotlessly clean room.. Sparkling vessels stacked neatly, groceries and provisions all lined up in rows -- rice, dal, vegetables, spices -- all of the best quality. One would think this was the kitchen of a five star hotel.

Maybe Krishnan achieves that effect because he was once a chef at a five star hotel in Bengaluru.

"Today's lunch is curd rice, with home made pickle, please taste it," he says, serving me on a plate made of dried leaves. 
The food is excellent.

"I change the menu for different days of the week. They will get bored if I serve the same food every day," he says with an enthusiastic and infectious smile.
 


Krishnan cooks breakfast, lunch and dinner with the help of two cooks. He takes it himself to his wards on the street each day.

"I don't feed beggars. They can look after themselves. The mentally ill won't ask anyone for food or money. They don't move around much too. I find them in the same place every day."

That morning he put the food in a large vessel, the pickle in a smaller one and loaded it into a Maruti van donated by a Madurai philanthropist.

Ten minutes later we stopped near a man lying on the ground by a high wall. Krishnan put the food next to him. The man refused to even look at it, but grabbed the water bottle and drank eagerly. "He will eat the food later, looks like he was very thirsty," said Krishnan.

At the next stop, he laid the dry leaf-plate and served the food. He then scooped some food and started feeding the mentally ill man himself. After two morsels, the man started eating on his own.

We then crossed a crowded traffic signal and stopped the vehicle. On seeing Krishnan, four individuals moved slowly towards the Maruti van. They stood out in the crowd with their dirty, tattered clothes and unshaven beards. 
They knew this Maruti van meant food. But they did not hurry, knowing that Krishnan would wait for them. 
Krishnan served them under a tree and carried water for them. "They are not aware enough to get their own water," he explained.

And thus we went around the city till the akshaya patra was empty. Of course, it would be full again for dinner later in the day. 


As we returned, a startling fact hit me. Not a single mentally challenged person had thanked Krishnan. They did not even smile or acknowledge him. Still Krishnan carried on in a world where most of us get offended if someone doesn't say thank you, sometimes even for doing our jobs.

The food costs Rs 8,000 a day, but that doesn't worry him. "I have donors for 22 days. The remaining days, I manage myself. I am sure I will get donors for that too, people who can afford it are generally generous, particularly when they know that their hard earned money is actually going to the poor. That is why I maintain my accounts correctly and scrupulously."
 
He then pulled out a bill from the cabinet and showed it to me. It was a bill for groceries he had bought seven years ago. "This bill has sentimental value. It is the first one after I started Akshaya."

The economic slowdown has resulted in a drop in the number of donors. Earlier, they sustained meals for 25 days. 
Software giants Infosys and TCS were so impressed with his work that they donated three acres of land to him in Madurai . Krishnan hopes to build a home for his wards there. He has built the basement for a woman's block which will house 80 inmates, but work has currently halted due to a lack of funds.



This, however, is not the sum of his good deeds. Krishnan also performs the funerals of unclaimed bodies in Madurai . He collects the body, bathes it and gives it a decent burial or cremation as the need may be.

He gets calls, both from the municipal corporation and general hospital for the funerals.

He recalls with a little prompting how one day he saw a mentally ill man eating his excreta. He rushed to the nearest restaurant and bought the man five idlis. The man ate voraciously, and then smiled at him. The smile made Krishnan want to do it again and again.

Krishnan has not married and wonders if anyone would want to marry a man who spends his days cooking food for others. He is firm that his life partner has to agree to this kind of life.

His parents were initially shocked, but are now very supportive of their son. They advise him about the cuisine and also about how he can streamline the process. 
One wonders why he left his job in a five star hotel to bury the dead and feed the mentally ill. To this he just smiles and says, "I like doing it."
 
For more information on N Krishnan's trust, log on to:http://www.akshayatrust.org/ 
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Mr. Krishnan is doing this

** not for a political motive, because they can't vote

** not to convert them - their "religion" is irrelevant

** not in expectation of a return from them

He is a true dharmi. 

CENTURIES-OLD GRAVEYARDS DEMOLISHED BY THE STATE (in Gujarat, India) By Sanjana - TEHELKA MAGAZINE

http://www.tehelka.com/story_main43.asp?filename=Ne311009waking_up.asp

Waking Up The Dead

CENTURIES-OLD GRAVEYARDS DEMOLISHED BY THE STATE

Now, anti-Muslim prejudice in polarised Gujarat extends six feet under, reports SANJANA

Disturbing the peace A road under construction in Dahod could swallow up old graves and new. Locals tend to the intact graves of their relatives and gather up the remains from final resting places rudely unearthed PHOTOS: SANTOSH JAIN

ON OCTOBER 3, Ajaz Khan Pathan, a resident of Dahod – a quiet town located 200 km from Gujarat’s commercial capital Ahmedabad – decided to pray at his ancestors’ graves. The 250-year-old graveyard at Idgah Chaab Talav had always filled him with calm. Pathan also wanted to clean the graves and lay flowers on them. Nothing could have prepared him for what he saw when he came to his destination, which lies a few metres off Dahod’s main road. A frenzied mass of labourers, bulldozers and excavators had been set loose on Pathan’s oasis of tranquility. The work crew was busy digging up graves and levelling the land. Bricks, rubble and even bones that had lain undisturbed for hundreds of years lay scattered across the raw earth.

Several hours later, Pathan and his friends learnt that the Dahod Municipal Corporation (DMC) authorities had decided that the town needed a new road – a road, as it turned out, that would cut right through a section of the graveyard. There had been no prior notice given to anyone. Dahod is easily one of Gujarat’s most backward districts and over the years, its backwardness has become an easy answer for a range of questions, be they on funds for education or relief for riot victims. When Khan and other Muslims asked why the graves of their forefathers had been desecrated, DMC President Gulshan Bachani (of the BJP) claimed that the road was necessary to develop Dahod – and lift it out of its backwardness.

Says Khan, “We waited for five days before being granted a meeting with Bachani. We would go every day, see him in his office, but return without a meeting. Meanwhile, the graveyard continued to be levelled. When we were finally granted an audience on October 8, the president was firm in his claim that the road was necessary for Dahod’s development.” Khan and others say that Bachani refused to discuss details of the project with them but only told them repeatedly that it would increase traffic into the town and hence bring development to the region – an explanation they reject. “We are convinced this is another way to inflict violence on Muslims. They knew the graveyard is an ancient one and that it would be sacrilege to dig up graves and disturb the bones of our ancestors. But none of this matters to them at all,” says an emotional Farooq Bhai Patel. “They tried to kill us all in 2002. The ones who survived are being killed in a different way now,” he adds bitterly.

Patel is a fruit merchant in Dahod and, along with Pathan and others, is a member of the Dahod Muslim Panch – an organisation that has been working to uphold the rights of the Muslim community after the 2002 riots.

UNFORTUNATELY, THE facts appear to substantiate the Panch’s charge of anti-Muslim prejudice. In an extensive interview with TEHELKA, DMC President Bachani admitted that the road project was a scheme approved in 1977 and could give no conclusive answer to why a 32-year-old plan was being revived. He also failed to explain just how the Rs 50 lakh road project sanctioned under the Tribal Sub-Plan (a government scheme for tribal development projects) would benefit the tribal community. Bachani would only repeat throughout that, “The road will improve connectivity.” And just how much of the graveyard will the road project take up? Shockingly, Bachani admits that he has no idea, because the project construction — and graveyard desecration — started without a proper survey being completed.

When this reporter raised the issue of discrimination against Muslims and asked if the road project would have gone ahead if a temple had stood there, Bachani retorted, “How can you compare temples and graveyards? Temples are filled with living people. Graveyards are full of the dead. Who cares about them?”

But this is not an isolated case. Last year, in Tilakvada, 150 km from Dahod, a section of the Muslim graveyard was cleared for an office of the district’s Agricultural Produce Marketing Corporation (APMC). As news spread of the Tilakvada gram panchayat being pressurised to hand over the land, local Muslims filed a case in the district court. In October 2008, a month after the court awarded them a stay order, the district collector, despite being served a copy of the order, signed papers handing over the land to the APMC. The graves began to be dug up the very next day. The locals approached the high court, but by the time it granted a stay order, the APMC office complex was nearly complete.

Local Muslims are being punished for opposing the demolition. Musabhai Mahmadbhai Ghanchi, 60, was slapped with an eviction notice for a house he built on his own agricultural land – and has lived in for the past 25 years. And when Allarakha Masidkhan Malik went all alone to place flowers at the spot where his ancestors’ graves had been, he — and he alone — was slapped with a police case for being part of an unlawful assembly. Soon after Malik was bailed, AJ Chanpura, a taluk official, cancelled Malik’s hotel license. Both APMC District President Umang Patel and Chanpura refused to speak to TEHELKA.

‘How can you compare temples and graveyards? Temples are full of the living; graveyards are full of the dead. Who cares about them?’ says the DMC president

The story of Chandvada, about 60 km from Tilakvada, is even worse. The local Muslims have had their graveyard turned into a cattle pasture, with dung and haystacks scattered across it. Attempts by Muslims to explain that the graveyard was a sacred place have been completely disregarded by local Hindus. In conversations with TEHELKA, both communities held the other responsible for the situation as it existed currently.

Activists like Harsh Mander and Shabnam Hashmi who have been working in Gujarat for several years believe that the destruction of graveyards is yet another manifestation of rampant communalisation in the state. Explains Mander, whose recent book Fear and Forgiveness: The Aftermath of Massacre tracks the ongoing discrimination in Gujarat after the 2002 riots, “These are decentralised efforts, really; methods devised at local levels to constantly remind Muslims of their second class citizenship.” For Hashmi, the issue was even more distressing since it highlighted the utter disregard for the judiciary. Said Hashmi, “With police and government officials batting on the same side against Muslims, the situation is bleak. People like us who constantly attempt to highlight the continuing violence are now looked at askance or threatened with violence ourselves.”

WRITER’S EMAIL
sanjana@tehelka.com

Sequential Destruction of Muslim Nations - Now Pakistan - By LIAQUAT ALI KHAN

http://www.counterpunch.org/alikhan10212009.html

October 21, 2009COU
Sequential Destruction of Muslim Nations

Now Pakistan

By LIAQUAT ALI KHAN
A conspiratorial view of the world is frequently inaccurate, exposing more the paranoia of the view rather than the reality of the world. The sequential destruction of Muslim nations -- Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, (and Iran is on the list) --- may or may not be a conspiracy hatched in Washington D.C., but it is becoming an international reality.  It is no secret that the United States and Europe, with varying degree of mutual cooperation and some make-believe internal discord, superintend the sequential destruction of Muslim nations. This War of Sequential Destruction (WSD), despite Nobel-Laureate Barack Obama's denials, refuses to go away. 

The WSD is multi-frontal. It crosshairs Al-Qaeda, Taliban, Hezbollah, Hamas, Al-Bashir,  Ahmadinejad, Sunni, Shia, Wahabi, Gaza, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Iran, Afghanistan, and now Pakistan. Many Western policymakers rarely see Muslim nations, including allies, with any inherent respect.  Vice President Dick Cheney described the Muslim world as "brute and nasty." Obama advisers, though more guarded in their word choices, see Muslim nations no differently. The idea that Islam is inherently violent, openly expressed during the Bush administration, continues to animate foreign policy. The White House holds a new President but Congressional leadership and Washington policymakers are more or less the same. Anti-Islamic policies of warfare and destabilization are intact.

Therefore, the WSD will continue and gather momentum. The picture is not pretty. Palestinians are penned in misery and their territorial cage is constantly shrinking to meet the "natural growth" of vociferous settlers. Oil-rich Iraq is under American occupation and its communities have been torn apart with irreversible harm.

Afghanistan, one of the poorest nations in the world, is placed under the boots of Western armies. Thousands of Afghans have been murdered, their houses bombed, their villages devastated. The International Criminal Court headquartered in Holland has indicted the first sitting head of the state, the Muslim President of Sudan. The United States and Europe, themselves armed with thousands of nuclear heads, are strategizing to punish Iran for asserting a treaty-based right to produce nuclear energy, leaving open the option of attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities.

After razing Iraq and Afghanistan, the WSD has now turned to ravage an ally, Muslim Pakistan. Pakistan is a nation that the British, in 1947, carved out of India and that India, in 1971, broke into two, liberating Bangladesh from the murderous clutch of the Pakistani military. Over the past sixty-two years, Pakistan's military and civilian rulers, one after the other, and without exception, have turned to America for military training, weapons, money, and strategic instructions.  Eager to send their sons and daughters to Western cities for education and employment, Pakistani politicians, generals, and bureaucrats all look for ways, and create the ways, to oblige Western capitals, particularly Washington D.C.  Partly for personal interests and partly out of faulty readings of geopolitical situations, Pakistani rulers, like most rulers in Muslim nations, frequently compromise national sovereignty and public welfare.

The Pakistani orientation for self-destruction serves American interests. Facing a failing campaign in Afghanistan, Obama advisers decided to expand the war into Waziristan and other parts of Pakistan.  The United States desperately solicited the Pakistani military to join the Afghan war. Pakistani rulers, this time a democratically elected government, listened to the American call. They first permitted the CIA to fly drones armed with missiles, which killed a few militants but hundreds of civilians in the tribal areas. The United States later urged Pakistan to invade Swat to kill militants. Pakistan did. Millions of civilians were made homeless.

The reaction to drone attacks and the ground offensive in Swat was fierce. Pashtun and Punjabi militants began to attack soft and hard targets. They attacked police stations, military trucks, and even the military's fortified headquarters in Rawalpindi. Citing these counter-offensives as a threat to Pakistan's national security, the United States urged the Pakistani military to launch a ground offensive in Waziristan. The rulers listened to the call and sent 30,000 troops to Waziristan. Muslims fighting Muslims have been efficacious in weakening the Iraqi militancy. The same formula, Obama advisers are betting, will crush the Pashtun resistance in Afghanistan.
 
Certainly, the United States can kill hundreds of thousands of Pashtuns on both sides of the AF-PAK border, even if no more troops are dispatched to the region.  Killing militarily weak populations requires no sophisticated military strategy. The convenient but thoroughly demonized label of "Taliban" provides the rhetorical shield to justify the ghastly massacres of civilians. Since Pakistani military has joined the war, killings on both sides of the border will become even more robust. These killings will carry an air of logic, even legitimacy, since no military presumably kills is own people unless it sees a threat to national security.

  

Under coercion, Pakistan has started a civil war that will consume its economy, national security, and tear apart its social fabric. The civil war will spill into many parts of Pakistan. It already has arrived in some parts of Punjab. Militants are unlikely to confine this war to sparsely-populated Waziristan. They are taking the war to the most populated cities, including Peshawar, Rawalpindi, and Lahore.  Karachi, which appears to be quiet, is sitting on a tinderbox. Karachi can erupt any minute as its ethnic rivalries are primed for a civil war. It is sheer foolery and a grave analytical mistake to presume that the Pakistani military offensive will provoke no one but only a few misguided militants in the North.

It is not yet too late for Pakistan to return from the precipice of national suicide. Pakistan must take a U-turn and preempt the civil war. Pakistan must say an emphatic no to President Obama who must also carefully weigh the stakes of expanding the WSD to Pakistan. If the NATO forces cannot subdue the militancy in Afghanistan, adding one more military into the battlefield will not solve the problem of occupation and resistance. Furthermore, an internally torn Pakistan does not weaken but empowers militants.  Obama advisers must ponder over one thing more: The people of Pakistan, like the people of Iran under the Shah, might rise to oppose the US hegemony over their internal affairs.

Ali Khan is professor of law at Washburn University School of Law in Topeka, Kansas, and the author of the book, A Theory of International Terrorism(2006).