Writings that catch your attention

I read a lot. ( I am sure most of us read a lot :) ) As I read the various magazines and newspapers, I come across some beautiful thoughts or writings that catch my attention – either for the topic or for the way it has been written. Sometimes I cant help but treasure those writings. In this post I am sharing with you a few of such writings. Also along with the excerpts of the articles that I am sharing with you, is also a link to the complete article. Please click on the article name ( for eg: " Barefoot: Children beyond divides " etc. ) to go to the actual article.

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A young boy of 10, Anil, peeps into the hostel room of Harsh Gupta, delivering his laundered clothes one evening, and asks him tentatively, “Do you know how electricity is produced?” Harsh, a student at IIM Ahmedabad replies: “Yes! You want to know about it?” Anil nods eagerly. Harsh tells him electricity comes from water. When huge amounts of water fall from a height, electricity is produced. But Anil is unconvinced. “In my village whenever there are rains, we don't have electricity for days and weeks.”

Barefoot: Children beyond divides – Harsh Mander in The Hindu

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Ashish Jha, a student of IIM Ahmedabad, meets 12-year-old Mujahid in Juhapara, a Muslim ghetto in Old Ahmedabad that swelled with victims of the 2002 carnage who were unable to return to their villages, in another after-school centre supported by the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation. Among the children there, he found Mujahid the brightest and most confident.

Ashish describes the communal divide, which has grown between children after 2002. The children were sharing jokes, and “there was a particular pattern that I found amusing. There were these jokes on a Hindu, a Muslim and a Christian trapped on the 20th storey of a building on fire. They all jumped one after another and due to some funny reason the Hindu kept dying every time. I recalled listening to similar jokes in my childhood; only that the Muslim kept dying in them." Ashish adds: “I asked if any of them has Hindu friends. All went silent. Only Mujahid quietly said, ‘Not any more'.”

Barefoot: Children beyond divides – Harsh Mander in The Hindu

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A red brick wall encloses the sprawling, shaded campus of India's finest business school, the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. On the pavement just on the other side of this wall live a large cluster of homeless families — rag pickers, construction workers and beggars. One of my students, Manish Verma, remarks on the irony that ‘a mere 100 metres separate the lives of those who wage a battle with hunger each day, and those who wage a battle for securing a high-paying job out of the best business school in India'. The chasm that separates life on the two sides of this brick wall seems the distance between two planets, separated by light years.

Barefoot: Worlds Apart – Harsh Mander in The Hindu

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It was a cold December evening in the north. I had just bought myself a pair of leather stiletto shoes that I had been lusting after. Returning home late from work, I walked up the quiet street. Most homes had their doors and windows tightly shut against the cold and there were very few people outside. In the hutments a little away, I could see people huddled around the open fires over which their meagre meals were being cooked.

The sassy clickety click of my shoes on the road was an immensely pleasing sound and I walked happy. Suddenly, from nowhere appeared a street urchin, a little boy of four or five. Driving an imaginary scooter, he buzzed past me in a thin shirt and leggings, his bare feet thumping loud and clear on the cold asphalt. The shame at my own vanity and the embarrassment at not being able to silence the harsh sound of my heels that night has stayed with me to remind that true happiness does not lie in stuff, it lives inside of the heart like it did in that little boy’s.

Hail Happiness - Shefali Tripathi Mehta in Sunday Herald

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