Bizman turns philanthropist, feeds hundreds daily in Rourkela
1
2
Rourkela: In a remarkable display of humanitarian service, a 61-year-old former businessman has been providing free meals to hundreds of underprivileged people in the steel city for the past five years.
Subhash Baporia, a resident of Basanti Colony, quit his business in 2019 to dedicate himself to serving the poor and destitute through his organisation, 'Nar Sewa Narayan Seva'. What began as a personal mission has now grown into a network of over 1,000 members, with 21 active volunteers and 100 regular donors.
"God has given me everything, and I wanted to give back to society. I will continue serving the needy until my last breath," says Baporia, who lives with his wife, three sons, daughters-in-law and seven grandchildren.
The organisation serves breakfast to 25 people, lunch to 40, and dinner to 50 individuals daily. The meals are prepared in Baporia's house and distributed via scooter throughout the city, from Panposh area to Rourkela railway station.
Beyond providing meals, the organisation has expanded its services to include distribution of 56 wheelchairs, 9 tricycles, and 5 crutches to differently-abled persons, payment of school fees for underprivileged students and provision of medicines to the sick.
by Taboola
by Taboola
Sponsored Links
Sponsored Links
Promoted Links
Promoted Links
You May Like
Pinga-Pinga e HBP? Tome isso 1x ao dia se tem mais de 40 anos
Portal Saúde do Homem
Clique aqui
Undo
He also distributed slippers, umbrellas and blankets to the needy. He also installed 4,500 water jars and 9 drinking water coolers across the city and placed 96 cemented water pots for stray animals.
The organisation also works closely with Asara Aloka, a local beggar rehabilitation centre. "Baporia ji not only rescues homeless people but also supports our centre with essential facilities," says Ashutosh Pradhan, manager of the centre.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, when many struggled to access food, Baporia's organisation stepped up its efforts, ensuring no one in their service area went hungry.
Baporia has demonstrated that individual initiative can create significant social impact, inspiring others to join the cause of helping those in need.
Follow more information on
Air India plane crash in Ahmedabad here
. Get
real-time live updates
on rescue operations and check
full list of passengers onboard AI 171
.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Scroll.in
27 minutes ago
- Scroll.in
‘Learning to Make Tea for One': Writer Andaleeb Wajid's memoir reflects quiet strength during losses
In her memoir of loss, Learning to Make Tea for One, Andaleeb Wajid writes, 'When 1st June arrived, I went to the hospital with a heavy heart once more. It was our twenty-fourth wedding anniversary. I tweeted that he was on the ventilator instead of being home with us … I got a barrage of wishes from people, and many said they were praying for him to get better.' On June 3, Wajid's husband, Mansoor, breathed his last, one of the countless lives that were cut short by the brutal Delta wave of the COVID-19 pandemic that raged through the world, hitting India especially hard, in the summer of 2021. The memoir takes us right back to those dreadful months when Death played Russian roulette and people, young and old, rich and poor, men and women, were indiscriminately snatched away from our midst with barely a warning. The pandemic was a great leveller; none were spared, but not everybody was equally impacted. Within a space of a couple of days, Wajid, who herself had tested positive and was hospitalised, lost her mother-in-law and her husband, and life as she knew it changed forever. Learning to Make Tea for One traces Wajid's journey of navigating through devastating loss and coming to terms with a 'new normal' – a phrase we use quite casually but one that marks the truth of Wajid's life. Grief is hard to process and even harder to articulate, and this makes the labyrinthine journey of negotiating it a very lonely one. This is ironic because grief is a universal emotion, one that every single one of us encounters in some shape or form at some point in life. But each grief is different and so is every experience of it, making it a shared but ultimately a lonely experience. The truth of this was perhaps most evident during the cruel pandemic, as its very nature made it impossible for us to reach out to one another at a time when we needed to do so the most. Perhaps there was also a sense of futility that accompanied those worst affected and prevented them from reaching out because as Wajid reiterates, ultimately, they were in it alone. Wajid was surrounded by family, but as she remembers, the presence of familiar faces only heightened the absence of that one face she needed to see the most and was lost forever. Though Wajid writes about seeking help through grief counselling, perhaps for a writer, writing what must have been a painful reconstruction of the past, was possibly the best way of coming to terms with her irreparable loss. Writing as recovery Even as one turns the first few pages of the memoir, a couple of things stand out. The first is the surreal nature of those days of the pandemic when the most regular, natural order of things – the song of a cuckoo, buying groceries, a phone call from family or a friend, were the only sources of relief in troubled times. Wajid's narration vividly brings alive a time when words such as 'co-morbidities' and 'saturation' became part of our everyday vocabulary, and one constantly lived in a state of mental fugue. The memoir also depicts the state of denial that Wajid lived in through those days, and perhaps, in some ways, continues to grapple with, possibly as a survival strategy. The chapter titled 'Everything is Fine' underlines this fact and it is only after one comes to terms with Mansoor's death that the undeniable premise of this memoir is unequivocally articulated – something that Wajid is unable to state at the onset simply because of the immensity of her grief. The memoir tends to meander into the past, digress into anecdotes, mostly about ordinary, everyday things – the Friday ritual of making biryani, Mansoor's love for Tamil songs and branded clothes, their shared love for notebooks – but like a refrain, the memoir keeps returning to the inescapable days and moments leading to Mansoor's death. But it is also through these meanderings that Mansoor comes alive, and you get a glimpse of the person that he was, and the life that he shared with his wife, sons and his mother. Loss is not something Wajid is unfamiliar with, having lost her father at the young age of 12, and two heartbreaking miscarriages she underwent before she had her youngest. But in many ways, the memoir also suggests that loss is what initiated Wajid into her journey of becoming a writer. Women's writing across cultural and other divides has helped women recover a voice that is often silenced. Writing has therefore been a survival strategy adopted by women. Wajid does the same with her writing – the memoir illustrates how writing became a means of emancipation for a girl who was married young. It gave her a livelihood and a career that she could not have otherwise envisioned for herself. In one of her most widely read novels, More Than Biryani, a mother and daughter come to terms with the loss of the father and surviving without the privilege of education and financial independence. But unlike them, Wajid had both and the memoir takes forward the journey she had hesitantly embarked on. It's now a journey that includes several romances, award-winning books for young adults and even a novel that has been adapted for the screen. Beyond carrying on Writing about grief isn't easy, reliving trauma isn't easy, and it certainly isn't easy to let strangers read about it. But Wajid writes this memoir with searing honesty – she doesn't hesitate to talk about a marriage between two very different personalities and how they settled into an easy companionship, of being assuaged by various kinds of guilt and making her peace with them, of her privilege that allowed her husband to have the best possible medical care while hundreds were gasping for breath, her not having to deal with the minutiae of life till she was in a better space, and so on. There is also the danger in such a memoir of infringing upon the privacy of a person who is no longer around to consent to what is being said about him or her. But Wajid does it in a remarkably sensitive manner, sharing just enough about her husband to enable her readers to see him for the person that he was but never over-sharing. Similarly, one sees her and her children at their most vulnerable moments and yet those moments are described with a quiet dignity and not with melodrama. She makes no attempt to evoke a reader's pity. What emerges is a story of quiet strength, of people dealing with the worst hand life can deal but soldiering on, even reclaiming some semblance of joy and demonstrating a resilience that life has a way of squeezing out of you. Many years back, struggling with a personal loss, I had read Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, a thoughtful gift from a dear friend. There was much in there that helped me to understand my own grief, but the opening scene of the parents sitting down for dinner, opening a bottle of wine while their daughter lay in the ICU of a hospital, left me with a sense of disconnect. Siddharth Dhanvant Shangvi's Loss continues to sit on my bedside table because while he so movingly writes about loss, he also perceptively shares that 'grief is not a record of what has been lost but of who has been loved.' But the real and raw feelings that Andaleeb Wajid's memoir evokes made it difficult for me to read it without tears blurring the print, but it also held out gentle hope that tomorrow will be better, that tomorrow one will live again, laugh again, even thrive. And this is what makes Learning to Make Tea for One an inspiring, even therapeutic read.
Time of India
an hour ago
- Time of India
Rajasthan factory worker, son of utensil cleaner, cracks NEET; set to become doctor
JAIPUR: Shrawan Kumar, a 19-year-old in Balotra who toils in a factory while studying and whose parents wash dishes at village ceremonies to support life in a thatched two-room mud house, has cleared this year's NEET. Shrawan was at work in his factory in Balotra town when he received word that he secured an impressive 4071 rank in OBC category. NEET results were declared Saturday. Shrawan's score is likely to earn him a seat in at least three to four govt medical colleges in Rajasthan. With just over 55,688 MBBS seats in govt colleges nationwide — and nearly 22 lakh students competing — Shrawan's success is extraordinary. His family's only source of livelihood comes from washing utensils at weddings and ceremonies, along with occasional MGNREGA work. Despite severe financial hardship, Shrawan remained focused on his education, completing both Class 10 and 12 from a govt school, securing 97% and 88%, respectively. Saturday's NEET results put Shrawan's mud house amid sand dunes in Balotra's Khattoo village in the spotlight. Neighbours gathered to celebrate and social media influencers flocked to the spot, hailing the teenager and his parents. "I am happy to see how people are clicking pictures with me and my family," said Shrawan. The fanfare was a far cry from the days since his childhood when Shrawan helped his father Rekha Ram Kumar clean utensils at village ceremonies and rear livestock to support the family. Although a bright student throughout schooling, he never imagined pursuing anything beyond Class XII—until life changed drastically over the past three years. Getting electricity in late 2022 and a free smartphone with three years of internet access—provided to his mother under a previous state govt scheme—completely changed his life. "It extended my study hours and internet exposed me to the outside world," Shrawan told TOI. Shrawan received free NEET coaching from a group of govt doctors in Barmer, who mentor underprivileged students like him. His goal is clear — to become a doctor and serve remote rural areas like his own, where healthcare is a distant luxury. "The nearest hospital is 15km away. Most doctors posted there don't understand our Marwari dialect, which makes it hard for villagers to explain what they're going through," Shrawan explained. Asked what change he wants to see first, the teenager replies pronto: "I hate watching my father spend hours cleaning utensils and being treated poorly. Once I start earning, I'll build a pucca house and ask him to leave that job forever." For Shrawan, who has never stepped outside Barmer and Balotra, the dream of studying medicine in a different district is thrilling and overwhelming. Shrawan's father has already decided how to meet the challenge and expenses: to sell the family's only assets — a cow and five goats. Follow more information on Air India plane crash in Ahmedabad here . Get real-time live updates on rescue operations and check full list of passengers onboard AI 171 .
Time of India
an hour ago
- Time of India
Father's Day in the U.S.: When, why, and how it all started
Father's Day in the United States is celebrated every year on the third Sunday of June, a tradition that honors the vital role fathers and father figures play in families and society. In 2024, the day falls on Sunday, June 16. Origins of Father's Day The idea for Father's Day traces back to 1909, when Sonora Smart Dodd of Spokane, Washington, was inspired to honor her father, William Jackson Smart—a Civil War veteran who raised six children alone after his wife died during childbirth. Moved by a sermon about Mother's Day, which had already become an established celebration, Dodd proposed the idea of a similar holiday for fathers. With support from local churches and community leaders, the first Father's Day was celebrated on June 19, 1910, aligning with the month of her father's birthday. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Join new Free to Play WWII MMO War Thunder War Thunder Play Now Undo National Recognition While the holiday gained some regional popularity, it took decades to be formally recognized: 1924: President Calvin Coolidge publicly supported the idea of a national Father's Day. Live Events 1966: President Lyndon B. Johnson issued the first presidential proclamation declaring the third Sunday in June as Father's Day. 1972: President Richard Nixon signed it into law, making Father's Day an official national holiday. Why June? The choice of June was largely personal—Dodd wanted to honor her father during his birth month. Over time, this became a tradition embraced by the nation, and now June is widely associated with celebrating fatherhood. Originally rooted in religious and community observance, Father's Day has since evolved into a more commercial and cultural event celebrated across various walks of life. From heartfelt messages to gifts and family outings, it's a day for recognizing the dedication, strength, and love of fathers everywhere.
