I came to the US in 2003 for my studies and it was not until 2007 did I visit India for my vacation. Four years might not sound too long but it felt like it was an eternity when I landed in Chennai. It was a complete change and the development was alarming. In spite of everything good that was going around one thing I noticed during my visit is that poverty was still the same. There were still kids without proper clothing or food. There were still kids running behind cars and coming out to watch a train pass by.

I thought to myself things haven’t changed much as I had imagined. While some of my friends thought that it was the mistake of the parents of those kids but my argument was what did the kid do to deserve this? With that thought I came back to US after a month’s visit and I saw a mail which my roommate had gotten and it had a charity organization (Don’t want to mention the name as I am not writing this to promote any organization) name on the top. I went online and checked it out and found that they help underprivileged kids for their studies and food.

That gave me an inspiration and started a research on my own, found a credible organization and started to contribute for the studies, food, and clothing for one child for an entire year. It has been 4 years since I started the contribution and I feel great. I also contribute whenever I can for other social causes, like some natural disasters etc. in any part of the world. I just feel that such things can actually make a difference. I am not writing this to boast about myself or to prove I am great but this is something I wanted to serve as inspiration to at least couple of people like my roommate did for me 4 years back.

I never wanted to share this with people and wanted these things to be discrete but I thought sometimes such thing coming to open is a good thing. We are always ready to jump on rich people and say they don’t contribute enough. We lambast the politicians for not doing enough to the society but when it comes to ourselves we get defensive. Contributions need not be high, small ones work too. My Indian colleagues come here to US and involve themselves in various charity works. Some people even adopted US soldiers; yes it is very good cause but again none for the country we grew up in. I am not saying that no one contributes, like I said there are lots of them who do but we surely can be better. Again I hope this hits the right chord with the people and does not come out as a preachy article.

A lot of people do excellent work in India and I really salute them for their efforts. In comparison to them I feel that I don’t do enough but I am happy with the start. Whenever I get the child report sent to me by the organization it just brings a smile on my face.