SINGAPORE: For Old Folk Here, A Surprise Santa... From India

SINGAPORE (The Straits Times), April 6, 2003: Retired journalist comes visiting, bearing gifts for 125 elderly - from online wish list they had put up By Wong Sher Maine FAR away in the little seaside village of Kundapur in India, retired journalist Ravi Chawla, 67, came across a Singapore website while surfing the Internet three weeks ago. It had a wish list from 125 old folk who were staying in the Sree Narayana Home for the Aged Sick in Yishun - they wanted things like radios, bedsheets and jewellery. Mr Chawla went shopping for the items on the list. Within a week, he had them all packed into seven boxes weighing 107 kg. He then spent $3,000 on air tickets for him and his wife Prema to come to Singapore. 'We did not have to pay for excess baggage because I e-mailed Air India about what I was doing, and they agreed not to charge me,' said Mr Chawla. The couple arrived here on March 19 and gave out their presents to the old folk in the home a week later. 'A retired man spending money doing something like this? People will either think I'm crazy or that I really believe in what I'm doing,' said Mr Chawla. 'My conviction is that having got a fair deal from life and society when I was young, I should pay back in some way by making other people's lives better.' It started when the journalist of 45 years, who wrote about rural economics, decided to put down his pen and retire from the city of Mumbai to rural Kundapur in 2001. In the village, which has a population of 30,000, he saw many poor old people living alone, abandoned by their children who had left to work in the city. Mr Chawla, himself a father of three children, then decided to start a non-profit organisation called Aashraya-India to build homes for these old folk. He started the ball rolling last year by pumping in over $26,000 - more than half his life savings - to begin work on the first home. At the same time, he collected items like clothes and shoes to distribute to the needy. Then, the man who is known as 'Papa' in his village decided that it was not enough to help just those in India. 'People often look up on India as a poor country, always asking the world to give something to it. 'So I thought: 'Why don't I do something in return for people outside India?',' said Mr Chawla, who chose the slogan 'The world is my family' for Aashraya-India. This is what made him contact the organisers in Singapore and come here on the spur of the moment. 'I cannot just be a dreamer. Life expectancy in India is 65 and I'm already 67,' he joked. He also chose Singapore because his son-in-law is working here as a senior engineer in a shipbuilding company, and he reckoned he could save on accommodation by staying in his daughter's Clementi flat. There were some wishes he said he could not fulfil - some people wanted to be rich, or to go home. But the Sree Narayana home's matron, Madam Thilagavathi, said it did not matter because Mr Chawla had brought smiles to the faces of all the residents in the four hours he spent there. Besides dancing with a shy 105-year-old woman and drawing a depressed resident, who had remained silent for months, out of his shell after he talked to him in Sindhi, Mr Chawla personally shook every resident's hand or gave them a hug. She described how a wizened old lady's face lit up when Mr Chawla presented her with a pair of heart-shaped earrings, and how he helped a 50-year-old man strap on his first wristwatch. In the three months he is here, Mr Chawla will visit other old folks' homes in Singapore and learn how the homes are run, so he can better run the one he is opening in Kundapur. 'I get such joy from helping these people. I may not be rich, but I am the happiest man in the world,' he said. Bringing smiles to old folk here is Mr Ravi Chawla, 67, whose non-profit group Aashraya India Trust in India proposes to build homes for the elderly.