Christmas was always my favorite festival of the year. Because of the colors, happiness, family togetherness, carols, wine & cakes and so much of goodie foods too. Even thou, I’m not a big foodie, at times I get this irresistible craving to have some spicy, juicy chicken or sinfully delicious chocolatey cake or a crispy hot samosa or a simple sandwich. But the mere thought of driving all through the city traffic and waiting aimlessly in a food outlet for never ending minutes, itself turns me down. And I prefer having my comfy foods, in my favorite PJ’s with a Shah Rukh Khan movie on screen and digging deep in my couch rather than going to a restaurant where we are expected to dress up (anything other than PJs, messy hair and no jewels is dressing up for me) and behave in a humanly way.
So last time when the new generation of the family met late in the evening with wine, gossips and laughter, everyone wanted different cuisines to hog onto. My home been the place of meeting, and me been the official driver of the family, I was expected to roam around the city, go to ten different restaurants to satisfy the taste buds of my siblings. So when a tech savvy cousin of mine, said to an already irritated me, “Why worry when food will arrive on a click.” … I thought she was teasing me. That’s when she told me about FoodPanda, the online food ordering site. Using this you could order your favorite cuisine from the many restaurants and the food arrives at your doorstep. They are also available as an app in iOS and Androids too. Awe! You could just imagine my happiness na. ;) I fell in love with this Panda then and there!
That
same Christmas, myself and my friends, decided to celebrate a day of the season
with the children of an orphanage. We arranged everything beforehand, ordered
food for 50 people in a catering service, bought cake, sweets, gifts for the
kids, and even harassed a friend until he agreed to be Santa. On the D-day, we
reached early spend time with the kids, played games, and was having fun. But
when the food came, my smile just disappeared. It was just enough for some 30
people. Going out and buying food for the rest, was not an option as time was
running out and the nuns at the orphanage were already in their worst moods
seeing the quantity of the food. That's when FoodPanda served the purpose
again. Though it saved our time but not from snarling stares of those nuns. But
the smiles we got from those little ones just were enough to make our day. How
I wished, like the food we got on a click, if I could give them all the
happiness they deserve with just a click!
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And
on that day, I released how fortunate I was to have a family. The kids in that
place had a roof over their head, but they were still orphans. They were so
poorly dressed, and the manners they have were not tolerable. And that place
was one reputed one, which gets support from all over the world and even from the government. So they could never say the excuse of lack
of fund to look after these kids properly. After seeing all this, we thought
why we can’t build a home, a proper one for kids like them, where they would be happy to come back after a day at school. We may not able to
provide everything for so many children, but if we could take care of at least
two, then that's enough. We wanted to build a home for the less fortunate kids,
which can be done only under a NGO which have experience for three years. And
in that josh we actually went and registered an NGO - "Nikshik" with
the help of an advocate friend. But when the NGO got officially registered and
ready to go, I had to get back to Doha and another friend got hooked up with
higher studies. Even though Nikshik is struggling in its initial stage, it's
running and doing its bit and we hope one day we could make our dream come true.
Like
Paulo Coelho said, "When you want something, the entire universe conspires
in helping you to achieve it."
And
we want this to happen so badly, so the entire universe have to conspire
together to make it happen.