To share

As I was walking on the narrow pavements flooded with rain water, near my college, I saw an old man with a heavily rimmed, almost broken pair of glasses just sticking to his nose. He was very feeble and exhausted of all spirits. He wore a tattered and almost brown dhoti and was barefoot, leaning on a stick. He sat on one corner and started to open his packet of food that he had luckily earnt for the day. His hands terribly shaked when he unwound the packet and by the time he opened it, half the food was spilt on the ground and he had just a bare minimum to fill his stomach with. He laid the packet slowly on the ground and started to eat it.

Just as he was beginning to eat, there was a stray dog beside him lying on the hard floor. It seemed to be recently stoned in a terrible way, that it was even unable to move, it kept looking at his packet of food with yearning eyes. The old man looked at the dog, he stared at it quietly for a while, and then to my surprise, his face carried a weak upward curve. He silently laid half of the food he had in front of the ragged dog and quietly started munching away his share of the stale rice.

Tears pounded on to my cheeks as I saw this act of his. I went near him and handed him a 10 rupee note and resumed my pace. There are a very few people with this great nature of sharing. From the elementary level, we are all told stories just to imbibe the goodness of sharing things with each other, but in reality it is inscribed in the hearts of a very few. The old man might have never stepped into school, never been told stories about so many good things that we have learnt. But he had in him, even though unmistakably poor and ignorant, the precious charecterestic, to share anything he got with somebody or some being in his life.