REDEFINING HEROISM

Every time someone says the word superhero, all we can think of is
Super-man, Hulk, Spider-man. Some of us who are more connected to
our roots might even think of Hanu-man! However, what easily misses
the eye are the “real” superheroes. These are the people who silently
work to make this world a better place, one good deed at a time.

NIMCJ has been truly blessed to be acquainted with one such person,
Hitesh Sethi and his wife, Archana Sethi. An able officer of the Indian
army, Hitesh Sethi passed out from NIMCJ in the year 2017 and moved
to Saharanpur, Uttar Pradesh. Recounting the time when they had newly
shifted, he said that moving from Ahmedabad to Saharanpur was a blow
for them. The shift from a classy and polished city to seeing the
deplorable living conditions of the less-fortunate ones, they felt they
needed to do something to uplift them. With this thought, they decided
that the very least they could do was to distribute food among the needy.
Initially for two months, they did a prototype wherein they drove around
the city trying to identify the places where these people lived, the kind of
reaction they received when they gave out food and if there were any
problems that could come up. Every night for two months, Mrs. Sethi
added more to what she was already cooking, packed it in containers
and distributed among the people.

Mrs. Sethi is a special educator and is currently
volunteering with a government school. She has identified students who
face difficulties in reading and writing and spends some time with them
daily. When asked if cooking extra sometimes seemed like a burden,
she gracefully responded by saying that it wasn’t any extra effort at all
since she already cooks for her family anyway. She proudly said that it
was not a load economically or work-wise. Even on her busiest days, the
sentiment that keeps her going is that everyone, no matter from which
walk of life, deserves at least one decent meal every day. Sethis shared
this idea with more families and as of today, 17-20 people are being fed
quality, home-made food. To add to this, they also help children with notebooks and stationary and other people with clothes and blankets
occasionally. The number of people being addressed is increasing with
every family who joins their group and helps them in their work. Their
group has successfully helped hundreds of people gain at least one nutritional meal every day. They realized that hunger was more than just missing a meal- it was a crisis that many people around them were facing and that they needed to do something to change it.
We see people on the roads begging for a basic right- food. But not all of us have the heart to help them, unlike these superheroes, who redefine heroism with their work, every day.