Midnight roses

A friend has me hooked to a program of helping. It's really a way to help the self and the way it works, one has to do an act of kindness every week and write about it (regrettably I manage at a much lower frequency). So recently when I was at a conference in Barcelona (home of Gaudi) I wondered, wouldn't it be great to do a little act of kindness in a far away city? I went through the lively La Rambla street - enjoying the scene and (in the back of my mind) looking for an opportunity of kindness - but I couldn't find something right away. It was mostly tourists and street vendors.

Finally, I returned to the hotel past midnight when a haggardly old man came up and asked if I could buy a rose. He had not sold one all day and was tired and hungry. I had a friend with me. She warned me that this could be simply a 'line' to rope me in. But I knew what to do. I bought 2 roses, gave her one and walked inside the hotel lobby and surprised someone with the second rose.

Ultimately it was really just a couple of Euros but at the end of it, at least 4 people were smiling their way back to the bed.

Comments

Anonymous said…
ohh yea i remember that.. :)

how are you and how was your trip back home? Unexpectedly my trip back to Albany via Milan, Venice, Rome was awesome... had loads to fun there...

btw i had a question regarding the Si membranes you showed in your presentation. I do not have your contact information so I had to use this blogger which was added in my favourites!

--Rashi
9:31 PM
yash said…
hey Rashi -
funny, i don't have your email address either. So we'll have to play this 'leave-a-comment' game. You can reach me directly at yshroff@gmail.com.

/yash

(ps: i never expected to discuss Silicon membranes on this forum, yikes!)
9:42 AM
Whatsup said…
Well, I havent yet able to do act of kindness to a total stranger yet. May be I am not looking hard enough. Looks like you had a great trip.

Souj
6:56 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Et tu, Machine Learning?

The rationale behind the rapid rise of Machine Learning can be summarized in a simple analogy. Imagine you have just invented the Wheel. At first, the idea was to have a rolling mechanism to take your boulder from one place to another (lever!). Then, you realized you could put two of these things together and make a cart. Much farther downstream, came the use of potter's wheel, roller skates and a million uses in-between. Likewise, Machine Learning started off as an esoteric way for academicians to find meaningful patterns in scientific data. But soon, it turned into ML for housing, for language, for breaking down every problem into one that can be (if not now, then soon enough) solved by a computer - you just had to provide sufficient input data to 'train' the models. Like the now ubiquitous wheel before it, Machine Learning is all things to every thing. That's remarkable but also significantly broad that no one would complain about the lack of ambiguity. I am workin...
Read more

Death and dying

I am not sure exactly what to feel. Sadness, anger, frustration - it's all welled up inside. One positive aspect of news reporting of the Mumbai killings is that the media is continually referring to the offenders as terrorists. I have been following this "terrorism" for such a long time that militant/freedom fighters are the only euphemistic monikers that I expect. This is a welcome change.  Even so, for posteriy, I want to document an AP report: " A police officer points out the spot where alleged terrorists are hiding to National Security Guard commandos outside a building housing a Jewish prayer hall which has been taken over by alleged terrorists at Colaba in Mumbai, India, Thursday, Nov. 27, 2008. Teams of gunmen stormed luxury hotels, a popular restaurant, a crowded train station and a Jewish center, killing people and holding Westerners hostage in coordinated attacks on India's commercial center that were blamed on Muslim militants. (AP Photo/Saurabh Das)...
Read more

Ram-Rahim Roti

I was given a simple directive. At half-past 6, show up at kalpatru fruit market, near the Hanuman mandir. Joined by a US resident fellow on the trail of digging below the "surface" of India, I asked the rickshaw-wallah to take us there. It is located in the old part of Ahmedabad, beyond the lal-darwaja (that's the gate Maharaja Ahmed used to enter the then tiny city of Karnavati-nagari nearly 600 years ago), through the cacophonous maze of teeny-tiny gullies and jam-packed streets.  Here is where the pujari of the temple, for over two decades, has been providing free food to all who come to his door. The concept is simple. You show up, you get food. No questions asked but love and smile offered unconditionally. We reached there to find a few people still getting their evening meal, sitting by the side of the road. The pujari lives in the temple itself, in one small room that has nothing but a 15" TV and a couple of mattresses on the side. The rest is a kitchen and a...
Read more