Fw: A True Story of a Villager, This Deepavali

[Guest guest]

I thought this was very cool!

 

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*The learning that comes from books and from conventional knowledge. The

light that fires the imagination and kindles the brain to seek its own

answers. The beginning of true education. The beginning of real knowledge. *

 

Many years ago, a villager from Jamkhed, where the mantra of paramedical

training for village women caused a miracle of healthy births and zero

mortality rates, was asked to accompany Dr.Arole to Washington DC. Dr. Arole

was to be feted for his earth changing experiment in rural self-development.

 

 

Dressed in a nine-yard sari, head covered, eyes bent to the floor, the

villager sat through the long speeches in accented English at the formal

event where the good doctor had taken her. At the end of it, he sent her on

stage to share her experience. She spoke briefly in Marathi. But she had the

audience listening all the same because she spoke with conviction. She said

she was a villager and as dazzled by the glittering chandeliers in the room,

as by the pomp and heraldry of the event. The chandeliers, she said, were

bright and lit the large hall as if it was night by day. "But," she said,

"In my village, we have small lights. They also light up our lives. Though

they cannot turn night into day, they can do something more. They can do

something a chandelier or an electric light, however powerful, cannot ever

do."

 

Saying this, she pulled out from the folds of her sari, a small, earthen

diya and lit it. "With this", she told the enrapt audience, "*I can light

another lamp and spread light into another's life, and yet another. Each

lamp can light many others*." By the time she finished the hall was on its

feet clapping*. Let us salute of the power of the little earthen lamps,

symbolic of learning, to dispel ignorance, sickness and negativity.*

 

SEE IMAGE :

 

http://www.smriti.com/photos/Family/Kabras/Diwalis/049Diyas_Diwali2004.jpg

 

 

Shubh Deepavali

 

*Let us salute of the power of the little earthen lamps, symbolic of

learning, to dispel ignorance, sickness and negativity.*