“Because that’s what kindness is. It’s not doing something for someone else because they can’t , but because you can.”

Andrew Iskander

Kindness is not an act that can be done mechanically; it is a gesture, a habit, the second nature of some people who are of the nature that they live, breathe, and act in a way to help others.

Today I would like to share the story of a person named “Vella Sardar” or “Bobby Sardar,” the Sardar ji from Shimla. A person who is a businessperson by profession and may be nearly 50 years old these days, but not exactly, I knew this person by face while I was growing up in Shimla and used to spot him if I was right in the lower bazar, where his shop is. I left Shimla in 1997 and moved to Solan (on my way to Ashram).And decades later, I heard about a Sardar Ji who was running a free food service in Shimla hospitals and free car services for cremation purposes. Now this sardar was the one person who had individually started a seva by providing free transportation for the people who couldn’t afford to pay for a morgue van. And he gave the services irrespective of caste, creed, color, or religion. Then in the coming days, he started a food seva in hospitals, and to take it to the next level, he even started collecting the leftover food from families and asked if they could send some extra food to schools.

Clever person that he is, he asked all the school students to bring one extra chapati every day, and his collection team would collect that extra chapati from the kids and then use the same to serve the attendants of the patients in hospitals.

A small gesture by one Vella Sardar ji turned out to be a movement in Shimla city, and now a lot of people have started supporting him, and the beauty is that today he also serves as the driver of the van and is just a call away.

The end note is that God’s angels are always labelled “Pagal, Vella, etc.”