Balbir Bakhshi23:39
I was very young then, many decades ago, that's when she was alive. It was a life-changing experience. I didn't realize then the impact that she was having on me. I was not, to be very honest, in awe of her or anything. I just felt the kind of work that she did with such love was something that I would like to be associated with.
I was working with a program called Naya Dhar. Naya Dhar in Hindi means soft heart. She had a center where we would pick up destitute beggars and abandoned people, dying — we would bring them to the center, nurse them to health. But in Naya Dhar most of them died because we got them very late.
One of the things that got me awestruck was the kind of love that she showed while picking up, cleaning the wounds and maggots from the wounds. It was a horrific sight, but she did it with so much love and care, made so much of a difference to the dying person. That had a lot of impact on me.
But being the person I am, I wanted to see change. I said if they're dying, we're not actually impacting them — at that time I didn't realize that even two or three days of love and care makes a difference. I wanted to do greater things, so I went and asked Mother Teresa if I could do something else. She put me to Shishu Bhavan — a program with abandoned children, mostly girls. We would take care of them.
She would say, her very famous magic: if you have a lot of clarity about what you want to do, you have conviction, commitment, courage, and then most importantly, compassion — you will always be successful. Those are some of the things I learned from her. Compassion and passion are interwoven. You can't do much with just passion — passion should lead to something. And compassion without passion is of no use. Those were my takeaways of those seven years with her.
I also learned that you need to be very astute. I wish I could be more like her. She would call me when I had moved on to a different city — she had another nun call me and she'd come on the phone and say, Shukla, I found a baby for you, and I'm naming her Shukla. There were seven girls that had been named Shukla after me, but I knew that what that meant was that I had to send her a check. And I did it happily.
There are still these kids who are really very disadvantaged — deaf, blind — and just being taken care of.