The Hindu Business Line : When Mother Teresa found smiles missing

The Saint of the Gutters, as Mother Teresa was known, obtained Papal permission in October 1950 to found an order of nuns, which eventually came to be called the Missionaries of Charity. At that time, the mission had 12 sisters, and “they owned two sarees, a jhola and a pair of slippers. They carried only Rs 1.50 a day, and walked or cycled around the city looking for dying or destitute people to help.”

Wearing a blue-bordered white sari, Mother Teresa would travel across Kolkata to help the needy — “lepers left to die by everyone around them; helpless women half-eaten by rats and ants; and even abandoned babies with umbilical cords still attached to them,” as Apeksha Harihar recounts in the preface to Precious Gems of Wisdom: Mother Teresa ( www.magnamags.com ), compiled by Karishma Bajaj.

Sample this ‘gem’ from among the scores in the book: “The poor give us much more than we give them. They’re such strong people, living day to day with no food. And they never curse, never complain. We don’t have to give them pity or sympathy. We have so much to learn from them.”

Mother Teresa had an unforgettable experience to narrate while delivering the Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, delivered in Oslo, Norway, on December 11, 1979: her visit to an old-age home.

“And I went there, and I saw in that home they had everything, beautiful things, but everybody was looking towards the door. And I did not see a single one with their smile on their face.”

“And I turned to the Sister and I asked: How is that? How is it that the people they have everything here, why are they all looking towards the door, why are they not smiling? I am so used to seeing the smile on our people, even the dying ones smile…”

“And she said: This is nearly every day, they are expecting, they are hoping that a son or daughter will come to visit them.”

Moving.

Terror trail from a second-hand computer

Clad in army fatigues and with AK-47 and AK-56 rifles hidden behind black shawls, four gunmen on two motorcycles rode by the American Centre in Kolkata, on January 22, 2002, at 6.35 a.m. when the area was enveloped in fog. They sprayed bullets on the security personnel who were handing over charge to the morning shift personnel. Four policemen were killed, and 20 persons critically wounded, in what was reported to be the biggest suspected terrorist strike in West Bengal. < /p>

Several hours later, on January 23, Daniel Pearl, an American journalist went missing from Karachi. “Both seemingly are incidents of diverse dimension, in distant port towns with no connections whatsoever,” writes Wilson John in The General and Jihad ( www.pentagon-press.com ). “There is a strong connection, however,” he adds, speaking about how terror groups had masterminded both the incidents.

“It was this terror network that Pearl was investigating when he went to Pakistan, a few days after President Pervez Musharraf spoke of coming clean on terrorism. More specifically, Pearl was interested in following the trail of Richard Reid alias the Shoe Bomber who tried to blow up an American Airlines Flight…”

The trail in Pearl’s hands had come from an unusual source. “His colleagues at Wall Street Journal, who were covering the US campaign in Afghanistan, had purchased a second-hand computer in Kabul. The hard drive of the computer contained a few thousand files written by Al-Qaida members,” narrates John.

“One file mentioned travels of a person named Abdul Ra’uff, who flew from the Netherlands to Israel, Egypt, Turkey and Pakistan scouting for targets. Ra’uff was Reid…” In August 2001, Reid spent most of his time sending e-mails from Internet cafés in Amsterdam to certain addresses in Pakistan, the author recounts.

“In December, Reid moved to Paris. French authorities have dug up similar e-mail exchanges between Reid and an anonymous person in Peshawar, Pakistan. Daniel Pearl was too keen to know who this interlocutor in Pakistan was, directing Reid on the terrorist bombing mission…”

The book concludes with a chronology titled ‘Musharraf’s Pakistan’, beginning with the coup led by ‘the General’ in October 1999. The overthrown Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif went into exile, towards the end of 2000, ‘after being pardoned by military authorities’. The chronology ends in March 2007, when Musharraf suspended the Chief Justice Iftakar Mohammed Choudhury, ‘triggering a wave of anger across the country’.

Of relevance.

D. MURALI

http://BookPeek.blogspot.com

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