December 2011

It’s safe to say that to a person those reading this aren’t being abused, persecuted, jailed for their beliefs, or aren’t living under the hardships of civic strife and wars. We all enjoy basic freedoms of religion, speech, assembly. We can dislike our elected representatives and say so without reprisals. We enjoy a certain material well being too. We can count on sanitation, not only running water but running hot water, flushing toilets, electricity not only to compensate for the dark but to fuel the appliances and electronic gadgets we have come to rely on. We have the power to eat healthily and if we don’t, the onus is on us. In brief we start out the year better off than a number of millions who share the planet with us. Certainly all of us have problems and some of us have serious problems, but the context in which we struggle to deal with those problems is far easier and far less harsh than the one of so many who struggle with the same issues in far harder circumstances.
As the new year begins may we keep our perspective, may we be grateful not because it’s become trendy, but because we genuinely have more than many, people as human as we, who are as deserving as any of us.

Sarath Babu still lives with his mother in the same Chennai slum where he grew up. The house has brick where I bamboo stood, but it is a reminder of his commitment to help others. Thanks to his mother’s sacrifices and mostly his own efforts he was able to attend prestigious Indian universities and even get an MBA. Then he made a choice. He was offered high paying jobs, but he’d always had a dream to help others in the slum where he was raised. For each person he could employ he could help several others, since each worker was taking care of 5 or 6 people. He chose his dream, and while things were hard at times, he now employs 250 people in a fast growing food catering empire. His goal is to create 100,000 jobs and he’s hard at work expanding his business. At 31, he still have much time to succeed.
It is a time of the year when we glibly speak of the Christmas spirit forgetting perhaps that it can shine through non Christians as well. Whatever it may be called in whatever religious tradition, may what animates Sarath Babu inspire us all year long.

A recent story on CBS news featured something we don’t often associate as one of the prices we pay for war, canine PTSD. Dogs that are used in sniffing landmines and participate in combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan have been found to be suffering from PTSD (post traumatic stress syndrome). Suddenly their behavior becomes different, they retreat, go the other way, can’t stand to be touched, don’t respond as before. In those cases where they can be rehabilitated, just like people with love, time and patience, they do get better. Aside from a touching animal story, the item is a powerful reminder of what we overlook about dogs and surely other animals. It reminds us of how much they can suffer, of the depth of consciousness they possess which we often ignore and in how many circumstances they are no different than humans.