CREATING A LAND OF LOVE …
A group of people who had forgotten to laugh or cry and were made to live like subhumans by a callous society, just because they had contracted an infectious disease (which is actually curable), are now not only smiling with joy brimming in their hearts, but are also looking forward to making beautiful lives out of themselves. Those who were society's outcasts are now outstanding testimonies of the Power of Love. Read this story and you will know how we can create a 'land of love' anywhere if our intentions are pure and if we are dependent on none else but the Divine.
Naya Bazaar Kustha Ashram lies some distance away from the township of ‘steel city’ Rourkela, in Orissa, a state in North East India. ‘Kustha’, in Oriya (the language of the state) means leprosy. In this colony, amid rundown mud thatched houses, live around 300 people, labeled as lepers and permanent outcasts by society and made to suffer a life of ostracism, poverty and neglect.
This was the case, a few years ago, but not true anymore. Now, this area has turned into a land of love which can turn even the most stone-hearted individual into a ‘Mother Teresa’ or a ‘Mahatma Gandhi’. The turnaround brought about in this despised-by-all settlement by the Sai workers of this region is most stunning and stands as testimony to the power of Pure Love that Bhagavan Baba is. To start with, the Sai volunteers did not call them ‘lepers’. They explain:
“We never call them as lepers, but as ‘Narayanas’ (embodiments of God). We don't have to remind them about their grim existence and future by using a word and name that reminds them of their disease - but a name that reminds them and us too about their real nature – divinity.”
In this article too, we will use this word “Narayana” while we share with you this touching story of a group of people most wish to forget. Vivekananda Sahoo, a former student of Bhagavan’s University, who hails from this state of Orissa
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