To be so inspired

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."

~Margaret Meade

*All photos courtesy of Krishnan, Akshaya Trust, Madurai

As many of you know, I am running a marathon on March 19th outside of Bangkok, Thailand, with the director of the SITA program, Trudy. What you don't know is that we have decided to run this marathon to raise money for a local charity called Akshaya Trust, which feeds mentally ill homeless people on the streets of Madurai.

Just three weeks from now, Trudy and I will embark on one of the most challenging things we have ever done. And it seems only fair to do this for people who have faced challenges I cannot even begin to imagine. We chose Akshaya Trust because it not only literally saves lives, but it inspires in others a desire to do the same. It's founder is not much older than I am, and he pretty much does it all on his own. It is run entirely on donations and on his endless energy and belief that he can make a difference. And he definitely does.


Akshaya Trust was started just two years ago by a young man (almost exactly 2 years older than me) named Krishnan. (I also happen to work with Krishnan's aunt's mother-in-law...which here is as good as immediate family.) Krishnan had gone to culinary school in Madurai and was working as the head cook at a five-star hotel in Bangalore. He came back to Madurai on vacation and was hit my the number of starving mentally ill people on the streets. While he was home, he cooked meals for a handful of people who lived on the streets near his house, and ended up quitting his very high-paying job in Bangalore to come back to Madurai and cook for mentally ill people living on the streets of Madurai.

The number of people he cooked for gradually began to grow, and people from the community started coming to Krishnan with names or locations or descriptions of people who needed his care. Initially, Krishnan funded all his work himself. And as people in the community learned of what he was doing, he started receiving donations.

Akshaya Trust was recognized two years ago by the Indian government as a non-governmental human aid organization. For the past two years, Krishnan has cooked and delivered 3 meals a day to 120 mentally ill homeless people in Madurai. His route covers a total of 120 kilometers every day. As his training is in cooking, the food he cooks is high quality - he refuses to save money by buying lower quality ingredients. He now has two other people working for him - a driver named Kumar and a young helper named Mani. Krishnan, Kumar, and Mani allowed Trudy and I to join them on their lunch rounds this past Saturday.

I can honestly say that I have rarely in my life been so impressed with human beings. It was incredibly tiring work - and I only did one meal, on one day. Krishnan has done 3 meals a day for the past 2 years, and says he plans to do so for as long as he is physically able. And I believe him.

Krishnan literally sustains these 120 people, for all purposes forgotten (and often abused) by the rest of the citizens of and visitors to Madurai. (How many times have I cycled by the cluster of broken people sleeping outside the train station? How many times have I ignored the calls of the dread-locked man outside my neighborhood grocery store? How many times have I walked away from him, having become immune long ago to the pleas of Madurai's thousands of beggars, without so much as a second thought as to the fact that I could actually do something to help him?) In addition to giving food, Krishnan gives these people something else they drastically lack - respect, acknowledgment, sympathy, and care.

And so many of them look up to him. They run to the van when they see it approaching. They smile. They hold their hands together in prayer, in thanks. Yet many of them are also so far gone they don't know who Krishnan is from one meal to the next. Some throw the food at him. Some he needs to feed with his own hand. It is thankless work, in many aspects. No income. (At the moment he lives in a room at his parents' house, which is says he will do forever if it is the only way to continue this work.) Not even any recognition from so many of the people he labors for every single day. Yet he continues to do what he does.

Krishnan is meticulous with his accounts - he even let me look through them all, I can tell you how every single rupee is spent. And Akshaya Trust is completely funded through donations. It genuinely needs the money, and I can tell you exactly where the money will go. There is no middle man. I speak with Krishnan - Krishnan gets and spends the money. I see the receipts. It goes to ingredients for cooking. It goes to petrol for his delivery van. It goes to drinking water for the people he provides food to. That is all. Food, energy, water. The basics.

And finally, as far as my reasons go, it could be me, on the street outside the train station. There is no rhyme or reason to why I am here and they are there. No reason why I am "sane" and they are not. No reason why I have not been put through the tortures they have, why I am in a position to walk by them without so much as a passing glance in my nice clothes and my combed blond hair and my shoulder bag full of snacks and water and cash slung happily over my shoulder. I've lucked out. But the issue need not be so foreign as that - mental issues aren't so far removed from me, from my family history.

For all these reasons - for the way Krishnan inspires me, for his undying belief that one person can make a difference, for the smallness of the organization, for the reason that I know where every dime of any donations will go, for the place inside me that knows that the people Akshaya serves are not so different from myself, for the very basic nature of the organization, and for the fact that it touched something deep inside me that has long been hardened here to the sites and sounds and smells of poverty - I have decided to run my marathon for Akshaya Trust.

Above: Krishnan, Kumar, and Mani in their food delivery van.

Below: One of the 120 people who benefits from Akshaya Trust's work everyday.

Also, as a side note, I would like to point out something I found fascinating. As you can probably imagine, I get stared at a lot here. People treat me differently - sometimes better, sometimes worse - because of my skin color, my accent, my American walk. But here, I am undeniably different, undeniably other.

One of the only times I have not felt that was on Saturday when I drove around with Krishnan. So many of the "wandering lunatics" (not my words) who wandered up to the car looked at me, really saw me, and no flash of curiosity flashed across their face. No look of bewilderment or expectation crossed behind their eyes. They looked at me like they looked at Krishnan, like they looked at the random person in line next to them. They would smile, put their hands together and nod at me. For the same length of time they did to Krishnan. With the same emphasis, the same eyes.

If it takes a crazy person to see I'm not that different, then I don't know what sane is.

Muharram

I know I'm risking sensationalizing an overly-sensationalized event (at least as the "Western world" would have it) - but it was too powerful, too intense not to share with you...

I was in Hyderabad during the Muslim holiday of Muharram, which marks the martyrdom Husayn, the grandson of the prophet Muhammad. The Hyderabad Muharram procession is well-known throughout India, and I still feel so fortunate to have been given the opportunity to witness it. Thousands and thousands of Shi'ite Muslim males, ranging in age from about 5 to 60, take part in a procession through the streets of the Old City. For the duration of the parade, they inflict pain on themselves, both as a sign of mourning for the murdered Husayn and as a sign of solidarity and loyalty to him ("if we had been there, this is what we would have withstood for you.") Some have blades attached to ropes that they rhythmically slash against their backs - most, however, beath their hands against their chests in perfect unison - right hand to left chest, left hand to right chest, right hand to left chest, and so on. It is all in time with this loud, rhythmic, pulsing music blaring from speakers on trucks and carts and pulleys. Many of the men and boys have razor blades stuck between their fingers - with each pounding of an arm, their chests become redder and redder, stained with fresh blood.

I sat up on a rooftop with the female students - a group of Muslim women had nicely motioned us up there, off the street. We sat for hours waiting for the procession to come. And as we waited, we talked to the women, who were eager to explain to us what was happening, eager to ask us what we felt about what we were about to see, and then eventually, what we were seeing. The roof became packed - spots on the side were soon going to be hard to come by. Zera, a young woman about my age to whom I had been speaking with some time earlier, motioned for me to come near her. I croutched down, sat huddled up in a ball on the ground, able to see the street below me through a perfectly arched window in the roof wall. Zera stood to my left, her cousin to my right, another woman behind me, leaning her elbows against the wall. I was completely covered on all sides - below me, the roof of a stranger's house on which I had been extended the most gracious of invitations to come and sit on, in front of me, my window out to the world, and then above me, behind me, beside me - black cloth. Burqa folds, enveloping me, isolating me, as if they were channeling all my energy, all my focus, all my powers of comprehension and feeling into that little window, onto the scene that was about to unfold before me.

The procession finally came - camels, elephants, throngs of people, jewels. And then the groups and clubs of males, and the music, and the waving hands and the music and the blood and the shiny glint of razors that you could see even from the rooftop when the boys moved their hands in a certain stream of light.

It wasn't at all what I expected. I don't know exactly what I had pictured in my head - probably something I distinctly remember pulling out of a Newsweek magazine when I was 7 or 8 to show my Dad - "Dad! In some places in the world, there is this religion, called Muslim, and they cut themselves and make themselves bleed!" When I was young, I think I pictured the agony in those photos, the chaos that must have accompanied such a horrific event, the putrid smell of blood, the tormented people participating, the horror surrounding such a sensationalist foreign awful painridden ritual. Mostly the chaos, though. And I know that last week, before I went to Muharram, I pictured chaos. Or frenzy.

But it wasn't either of those things. What stuck me most was how controlled the whole thing was - how the men all moved in unison with the pulsing rhythm of the music, how it was hard to restrain from silently beating on your own chest in time with them, how they fiddled with their razors, lined them up just right, and then started to move, to pound, to beat - as if it was a dance performance. Total control. Which actually is actually probably much harder than chaotic or frenzied beating - I imagine it is harder to continue, for hours on end, while you remain so acutely aware of your surroundings, your rhythm, your friends and peers - it is probably much easier to go crazy.

But it was controlled. And really, really moving. What a powerful statement, splayed out before me on the street - "If I had been there, this is what I would have endured for you." What faith. In the presence of such faith, I always wonder if I have that much faith in anything, let alone in someone or something that I cannot see or hear or touch. Enough faith to spill my own blood, again and again, in time with a rhythm, in a wound thats been opened a thousand times before...

A lot of the discussion after the procession focused on whether it was "right" or not, whether it was "good" or "bad" - a debate I would rather not be part of. The women on the roof immediately felt the need to defend what was happening on the streets below us, to explain the reason behind it - as if my foreign face carried on it a thousand words of condemnation. As I said, I won't enter the debate, other than to say I think it is far from my place to pass judgement on the people, or the faith, or the blood, or the reasons for such blood on the streets of Hyderabad that night.

I don't really have a point, here, I think. Just some rambling words drawing a picture of a little slice of one new experience I had. One new thing I saw. One new story, one new historical event brought into my consciousness. New to me, and therefore worth sharing. New.

But my feeling, while sitting there - the thing that I can write to you about with the least hesitation, the least fear of inaccuracy or of offending someone or of sensationalizing or of disrespecting - that feeling is not new. It is rare, but not new. I've had it a handful of other times - I would try to list them here but there seems to be no continuity between them, no meaning to anyone who would read this except for me, for I was the only one there, feeling this rare feeling, at all of them. Positive events, negative events - very large scale things (like Muharram) and very minute, passing moments.

It is a feeling of simultaneous reality and greater-than-reality. It makes my heart rest in my throat and my whole being feel like crying, but not in a sad or panicked way, but rather in an expression of not knowing what else to do. Of being faced with too much reality to find words for, so the only expression is one of tears. But it is not a sense of being overwhelmed - rather being perfectly situated in a precise moment that makes me feel alive, and makes life feel beautiful, no matter how "horrific" the scene that makes me feel that way may be. Does that even make any sense?

Maybe not. Point is, I feel deep gratitude for having seen it. For having been permitted to be at that place, at that time, with those people, witnessing that precise event. And deep respect for that which I cannot even begin to understand.