Young Narayanan Krishnan was destined to win awards as a chef while working as a chef at a luxurious hotel in Switzerland.
On one of his trips to see his family, in his hometown of Madurai in India, Narayanan had an experience that would change his life forever. He came across a very old man in the street who was eating his own excrement due to lack of food.
This experience transformed Narayanan's life: after feeding that man, he left his job and stayed in India to found the NGO in 2003 Akshaya Trust. Since then has served over a million meals to the elderly and mentally disabled, abandoned by their families on the streets of Madurai.
Every day Narayanan gets up at 4 in the morning and he tours the city of Madurai with his team, serving some 400 meals a day.
Narayanan spent all his savings to launch the project, He has no salary and sleeps with his team in the kitchen where they work.
It took a while for his parents to come to terms with the idea of their son abandoning his promising career as an international chef, to dedicate himself to cooking for the city's hungry. But the day his mother accompanied him on his rounds and saw what her son was doing, she told him that as long as he was feeding those people she would feed him.
Narayanan's dream has been to build a building to shelter people from the street, for 7 years it has struggled to obtain the necessary financing, and finally, on May 9, 2013 the building was inaugurated.
Narayanan says he feels very happyHe feels that what he is living is not a dream, it is more than that, it is his soul. He says that the people he feeds every day are the energy that moves him to live and that caring for them is his life purpose.
Narayanan's life is an example of compassion for other human beings, but instead of thinking of him in the usual terms, as a special person, we could see him from the point of view of someone who enjoys and is moved by what he does; from an honest and wonderful selfishness, in which a human being, due to the happiness and sense that his work brings him, gives himself totally to it.
Narayanan may not be a hero maybe it's a human being who has found a meaningful path for him and that it has been fully delivered. Perhaps that path is open to all of us, perhaps not with activities as flashy as those of Narayanan, but with others just as important; activities that fill our existence with meaning and desire to live.
Too many times we resign ourselves to the feeling of not knowing how to make a contribution to the lives of others, and perhaps we have that option closer than we think and we just need to see where we can make a significant difference in the life of at least one person. . That may be enough May each of us make a significant difference in the life of just one person.
Article written by Álvaro Gómez. More information about Álvaro here
These people are true examples, with human beings there is always hope, my respects!