I have an interesting story to tell you. For a long time I had been looking for a worthy cause to donate money to. If you live in America, then chances are that your mail box is occasionally bombarded by charitable causes dealing with health improvement e.g. Cancer Society, Heart Association etc. But I was looking for a cause which would be more meaningful. So this is how the story of finding a 'meaningful cause' for charity begins.

On a non-stop 15 hour flight from New York to Mumbai last August, I saw three movies on the personal small screen, customized for my seat. One of them made me cry. It was an old Indian classic (in Hindi) titled 'Mother India'. The movie begins with Radha, an old woman who is garlanded with flowers as a guest of honor to inaugurate a special occasion. And as she smells the flowers, it triggers a memory in her mind of the time when she saw and smelt flowers last time. Then the movie flashes back to a young and beautiful Radha, as a bride, smelling her wedding flowers. After this the movie is basically the hard journey of her life, as she plays the roles of a loving wife, a bonded laborer, a young widow with two sons and a single hard working parent who makes a living by farming in rural India set in the 1950s. Seeing this movie I cried thinking that the poor woman had not smelt or seen flowers since her wedding! And what a hard life.

On landing in Mumbai, as our car moved from the airport to its destination, I noticed huge hoardings every now and then stating one-liners in Marathi:

Mulgi shikli, pragati zali. (An educated girl is progress made.)
Mulgi shikel, sagayanna shikavel. (When a girl gets educated, she will educate everyone.)

How true, I thought in my mind. On returning to New York after four weeks, I read the book 'Giving' by Bill Clinton, in search of a worthy cause. The book is an eye opener to how each one of us can bring positive changes in the world, with not just money but with time, skills, experience, volunteerism etc. It tells you why you should give and lists many causes, charities, NGOs etc which need help.

Then I read 'A Thousand Splendid Suns' by Khaled Hosseini. I didn't want to put it down at all. It was so beautifully written, made me cry and moved my soul. To top it all, it ended my search for a worthy cause. The media tells you a lot about war-torn zones but it can never tell you how deeply it affects the lives of women and the physical plus emotional atrocities they have to tolerate, during war. At the center of this novel are two women, Mariam and Laila, who suffer infinitely, by being the wives of the same beast of a man. And yet they bond together in their common misery. On reading it, one can conclude that had these two women been given a proper education, this story would not have happened.

Recently, I read a very successful real life story of Indra Nooyi, CEO of PepsiCo. She is an Indian woman, who heads an American company and draws an annual salary of US $ 7.1 million. It just goes to show that Asian women have come a long way, from Mother India to Indra Nooyi. The string of all these events have made me decide to donate money, towards the cause of educating girls, so that there are no more Radhas, Mariams, Lailas and the world sees many more Indra Nooyis. With the launch of this new magazine, designed especially for the Asian women, I hope to learn more about the stories and struggles of many more Asian women who have come up successfully in life and made their mark on the world!

As I wrap up this post, here is a painting of Roses, in celebration of the fact that in today's age women can not only smell flowers on their wedding day, but also paint them, plant them, picturize them and blog them for a life time.

Ratna Dalal