Hello Friends, Good Morning.
Wishing you all a very Happy, Prosperous and Wonderful New Year - 2007. We thought of distributing blankets yesterday night and changed our mind and decided to distribute early in the morning. We started, a little bit late than planned, at 6 am. Yesterday night Kasyap has taken six blankets with him to start the distribution. This morning Ratan ji, me, Dr. Sundar, Dr. Kavita and Murthy went to Sec'bad and we distributed blankets to deserving persons. I will upload the photos sometime this day. The heartrending and difficult issue is that many people come, gather and they ran behind us. Ofcourse they are poor but they can manage without our blankets too. We wanted to give to old, handicap people. But few of them ran nearly 1/2 km behind us and we had to give them. They are all poor but some of them are young too. Anyways we think all this is a learning experience and we can define best strategies as we keep on working. We distributed around 25 to 30 blankets I suppose. Actually Srinivas also would have accompanied but we couldn't inform him. I will ring to Suresh garu, Srinivas and Kasyap today and find out if they are interested in distributing tonight. The best times are either night or dawn - 11 pm to 12 pm or 3 am to 5 am. There are 7 to 8 people near my house. They are old beggars. We tried talking with few people initially. They have come from Kerala and settled here. They made begging as their vocation. When I asked him why they have come from Kerala, they said they have come just like that. No specific reason. Later on we cannot ask as more and more people are coming to us. Sidelights: One person who is covering himself with gunny bag refused to take blanket from us. One person who seems like a mad man, ran away when we tried to give him the blanket. Murthy tried to wake up people and give so that other people cannot take away the blanket from them. At one place he just kept the blanket on the person and then woke him up. It seems he is some worker and may be due to late night or something he slept on the pavement. He looked very embarrassed :) Thank you. with regards, Prasanthi.
