The 1 st of August is our birthday. Two years ago, on 01.08.2020, the Sarfaroshi
Foundation in its nascent form was born. We celebrated it slightly later than
the actual date, on the 22 nd of August this year and discovered to our absolute
delight that we had gone from being an office of five people to an NGO to
actually much more than that – we had in fact become a movement. A cause, a
living, breathing pulsating organism that everyone owned equally. That was
reaffirmed strongly on our Founder’s Day.
We celebrated by hosting a convocation with the theme – `Faith, Healing and
Our Role,’ especially since we started our journey in the middle of the pandemic.
We were extremely fortunate to have Acharya Srivatsa Goswami as our chief
guest. A guru known around the world for his deep knowledge and insights on
not just Hinduism but comparative religion, came down all the way from
Vrindavan in Uttarakhand to shine a special light on all of us.
The guru’s words were simple yet profound. What is faith, what is religion, he
asked. Before it is about nomenclature or religion of any kind – Hinduism, Islam,
Sikhism or Christianity, the word `dharm,’ he explained simply means to keep
the breath in your body, in other words to regard your mind and body and give
it its due.
Our other special guest was the messiah of Shamli – Dr Khurshid Anwar. A man
who nearly lost his own life twice in the pandemic but didn’t stop to look after
himself because who would look after the hundreds of sick people who turned
up at his door? Even now, on any given day there are a few hundred people at
his clinic every single day. And Dr Anwar works seemingly unflappably, treating
his work with all the faith he can muster. He told us all and we could feel how
much he meant it when he said – the most important part of religion is
humanity.
After our main speakers had left us with so much to think about, our leaders
from all the villages and town areas we work in were ready with their speeches.
they were full of feeling and fire and also song and dance and theatre. The
convocation was clearly theirs, everyone owned it and everyone came there to
make it their own and they did precisely that.
Of course, when everyone owns a movement, it cannot possibly stick to time or
script. We had planned for it to start at 11am and finish by 1. But people were
zealously at the mike and podium until 3pm. At this point, the slightly frazzled
halwai – the maker of aaloo pakoras to whom we supplied 30 kilos of potato for
the aaloo pakoras said could we please get another 30 kilos? by 3pm everyone
was ravenous. 60 kilos of potato disappeared in under 60 minutes.
