Estimate your hunger. If you can’t, read on…

I went to a restaurant with my friend one day. As soon as we saw the menu card, we felt like hogging all of the dishes there! Without giving it a second thought, we ordered 4 dishes we felt like drooling over. The moment the first dish went in, I was no more “extremely hungry”. The second one almost filled my tummy. I loved the third one, so finished my share in the same momentum. Then! I looked at the fourth one and felt, “What was I thinking when I ordered this? But never mind, my friend is here to finish it”. But oh, my friend was equally full! We kept pushing the dish towards each other forcing the other one to complete!  Somehow we managed to complete half of it and that’s it! It felt like my stomach is gonna burst if I take in one more spoon. The rest of it went a waste.

Happens with you? This was me, about 2 years ago. Until one day, when I heard that a staggering ‘one billion people’ in this world sleep hungry every single night! There must have been days you’ve not had food and tried sleeping. Could you sleep? Not easy, right? Imagine the plight of those unfortunate kids who might have never tasted a candy! They never know how “Oh, I’m full” feels like.

When you order an extra dish at a restaurant that you can’t finish, it’s not the 100 odd bucks that you are wasting, it’s the resource! It’s the resource someone somewhere in the world is dying for. You can afford to waste 100 bucks, but not the food that’s keeping you alive. Most of us empty our plates at home, almost all the time. Why doesn’t this happen at restaurants? We fail to estimate our hunger may be, or we are too lazy to wait for the dishes to be prepared & served, so we order all at once. Or sometimes, it just doesn’t occur to us that we are ordering more food than we need.

Let’s try and keep this in mind next time we go to a restaurant - “Take all you want, eat all you take!” To mark a beginning to this, support this brilliant initiative – “Empty Plate Campaign” by 36meals, happening this weekend - March 23^rd and 24^th. You don’t have to move out of your house, it doesn’t take hours. All it takes is a photo of your empty plate after your meal and uploading that on 36meals Facebook Page or Twitter. Here’s the FB Event Page to join.

Of course that’s not the last day we follow it, but that’s the beginning for many people. Those of you who never waste a morsel of your meal, take lead and inspire the people around you. “All empty plates look good. It’s the plate with food left over that looks ugly”. So go ahead and post your photos!

Thank you.

The Beginning

I recall some of the times during my 4 years of college life when a lot of people told me – “This is the phase of life you can enjoy the most! Once you get into corporate life, you’ll not have the time to meet your friends and have fun. Each of your friends will take his/her own career path” and so on. These statements never sounded true to me in those years, and touch wood, not even to this date!

The challenge is to meet up old friends regularly and find a common topic to talk about. So we end up talking about movies, T20, politics or recall old college memories. But how often do you get to meet? Initially, once in a month, then once in 2 months, then once in 6 months and then probably years later! “What else could one possibly do?” you may ask.

While I decided to be a part of this wonderful start-up IU with the best of my friends and work together for a lifetime, not everyone gets a chance. How about working for a cause with your friends part-time? Recall the projects you did with your friends during college. Or if you are still an under-graduate student, wouldn’t you want these friends of yours to stay connected for a lifetime? There is a door open to this possibility! That is Social Entrepreneurship!

You could be a student, you could be an employee, you could be a home maker, you could be a businessman or you could be a retired individual but Social Entrepreneurship still has a place in your Life along with everything else you already do. It can bring back the enthusiasm in your life combined with the satisfaction of serving the society.

Make a new beginning in your life with ATTH – the first ever of its kind – Social Entrepreneurship Forum Live in Bangalore on November 4^th. Innovation, Inspiration, Live examples, Right Contacts, Right Platform, Right Time and more and more is Atth! Yes, I’m a part of it and enjoying every bit. Grab this opportunity, as you never know when the next one could be!

Log on to www.atth.org for complete details.

The purpose of life is to live a life of purpose…………………….

There are innumerous times in my life when I have wondered what the true purpose of my life is. What is it that I’m heading towards? What am I going to accomplish in my life? Where is life taking me? Little did I know that every human on earth has similar questions. Everybody is in search of his/her own answers for these questions. It struck me hard today when I heard this statement from a young social entrepreneur – “The purpose of life is to live a life of purpose”

Till today I was walking towards something, striving hard for something not knowing what that “something” is! Majority of the people I have met are like me. Is it that people don’t have dreams? No! It is that their dreams have been brutally killed by everyone around them when the dreams were just born. Many people do not dare to dream big today for the fear of what the society will think about them or that it will not come true tomorrow. I was one of them……….. But TODAY, I feel like I’m born again because my dreams have taken life again! And this time, nobody can dare kill it. “The question is not who is going let me, the question is who is going to stop me?!”

It seemed like a normal day when I got up this morning thinking that I’ll be going to college and finish few meetings for the day as usual. But what it turned out to be, now it seems like I’ve lived thousands of lives in this one day! This might seem like an exaggeration, but the feeling can only be felt, not explained. I did not imagine that I would be going to one of the posh areas of Bangalore with an elite club of social entrepreneurs to celebrate a new level achieved by my cousin working with us. We just enter a Van Heusen showroom and The Personality Mr. Sujit Lalwani (We’re blessed to be working with him! Thank God) just selects a shirt and gifts it to my cousin! This was the first time I saw a man just picking what he likes without checking its price tag and gifting it to someone in his team! Touched by the lifestyle.

We then get into the black Hyundai Verna self-earned by this 23 yr old individual and head towards airport road. To my ultimate surprise of my life, WOW, we enter THE LEELA PALACE! Every inch of that place speaks of richness and class. Every single pillar there says what the status of the place is. And we, the future big shots sit there and visualize our dreams. I was taught in school and in my childhood “Do not build castles in the air”, “Stop day dreaming”, “Don’t count your chickens before they hatch” etc., etc. In one shot, all these words became meaningless today! We went on and on and on discussing about our dreams and visions. If just the ‘feeling’ of the dream was so good today, I cannot imagine how it would feel to accomplish that dream. I just learnt “FEEL”, realize, visualize, express, believe, share and respect your dreams and CONTINUOUSLY work towards them, no power in this universe can stop you from achieving them! It does not matter where you start, but it matters where you reach.

I learnt how to give life to every single dream of mine and my parents and every single person around me and how to put efforts to turn them to reality. This is not even the beginning! “One life! Live it fully”

Please add life to this post by leaving comments if this piece of article has given atleast a molecule of oxygen to your dreams :)