The thing about promises is that they can be broken. I was almost on the verge of breaking a promise before I sat to write this saviour blog-post of mine.

The promise or the goal was that I’d ignore the negativity around me and write about the positive things, the little acts of kindness, love and hope on my blog this year. Two and a half months have elapsed and I haven’t written a word. In my defense, I was busy writing hatke marketing-related articles for Marketing Buzzar (You can find them here).

So like I promised in the month of January that I will write about people who help me restore my faith on humanity in this world of today, the person I pick today to write about is Suruchi Gupta, a fellow student at MDI, and her “The Umbrella” incident.

It so happened that we, the members of the Counseling Cell of MDI Gurgaon, were at a meeting discussing future plans for the college and also, our individual career paths when one of our seniors mentioned that on one of the days when we were in the first term and it was raining heavily, he had asked Suruchi, without knowing her then, for an umbrella and she, without hesitation, had offered him hers.

For most of my readers it might not seem that big a Deal; it wasn’t a Big Deal for all the listeners in the meeting too. But for someone like I, who had once begged for an umbrella from a colleague, whom I had known, who didn’t even need it at that time but had refused without any reason comprehensible by me, it is a big deal. It is a big deal because we seldom find people willing to help others without any personal gains for themselves. It is a big deal because such simple acts of kindness are all that brings a smile to the faces of the one who needs it the most. It is a big deal because I wasn’t a direct “beneficiary” or protagonist in this incident, so this incident helps me believe that there are good things happening to other people worth appreciating. It is a big deal because, like the Professor in the Counseling Cell said, a few years hence we may not remember people we meet by their names, their “CV points” or their CGPAs, but what would we definitely remember is the umbrella and the one who offered it altruistically.

In the end, what matters is what we have done for people we know nothing about or who can do nothing for us in return.