I am Poor

  

When I was doing my graduation, I stayed in a hostel, which provided lunch and dinner but no breakfast. You had two options for breakfast: Go out to a restaurant nearby and have a hot breakfast or eat what most of the students ate - mashed banana and flattened rice (it is called poha or chura in India). I chose the second option since the first option was too costly. The food in the hostel was neither good in quality nor enough in quantity. So most of the times, I was famished.

I used to pity myself till I had a discussion about hunger with one of my classmates. He was worse off than me. His father was dead and his mother used to serve tea and water in a government office in a desolate tribal village. In short, he had enough money to have just one meal a day. I asked him what he did when he felt hungry. He said he would drink water.

This classmate of mine was a good student but did not have a clue about what to do after his graduation. In those days, IT was booming in India and I convinced him to do get a Masters degree in Computer Applications (MCA). He got into one of the best Universities of India.

I did not meet him when we were doing our Post Graduation since I was at a different University. I met him a year after both of us had started our careers. He came to meet me. He was working for the largest software company of India and was on his way to his first foreign assignment. I felt very happy at how he had been able to turn around his fortune. He had started from a village which did not have electricity and his relatives and friends had not even seen life outside their village.

I am not in touch with him. But I searched the net and I found this photo. He is happily settled with his family in the USA.

So how do you deal with being too poor? Work hard and have patience. Things will turn around.

-Rahul Shrivastava,IFS