What would we do without beautiful stories to keep us sane?

As the nights grow longer and fog makes the days seem colder, a story to keep us warm through the winter. After 9 months of frustrating and exhausting search Tapeshwar Singh has found his missing wife, Babita. Babita was abandoned by her relatives in a dharamshala, which is an inn, usually near a famous Hindu temple, where pilgrims can stay cheaply, because she is of limited intelligence. Singh met her there, married her and settled in Meerut, in UP where Singh would work for daily wages. Then one day Babita disappeared and Singh was heartbroken. He would cycle around, often without food, with her photos at the front and back of his bicycle. Apparently, Babita forgot where she lived and was wandering around when she was picked up by a local pimp. But he abandoned her when he could not sell her, due to her mental state. At last, 3 days back Singh found her sitting alone by the side of a road in Haldwani in Uttarakhand, where she had been surviving by begging. He says it is a miracle, and it is. Such stories are sadly rare in a world full of violence and killing. For more than 20 years Gurmeet Singh has been comforting and feeding the abandoned, abused, often mentally ill patients in a Patna hospital. He talks to them, comforts them, pays for expensive medicines and even donates blood. Why? For no reason. Except that there is no one to look after the rejected flotsam of our society. If all of us were so caring India would not be one of the unhappiest nations on earth. Of course, there are explanations. Poverty, inequality, loneliness, lack of social support and so on. Professor Gupta writes that the poor are more generous than the rich because the poor have more friends who tend to support each other in difficult times. The rich are isolated, the richer one gets the more isolated he becomes. Studies show that after a certain limit increasing wealth does not increase happiness. Charity increases emotional well-being and makes us happy. So, to force us to be happy the Congress passed the Corporate Social Responsibility Act which mandates every company, with a turnover of more than Rs 10 billion, to spend 2% of profits on doing good. Wonder if the law applies to all the scams, under the Congress regime, which went into trillions of rupees. After all, scams were big business in India at that time. Sadly, it now appears that CSR has morphed into a public relations exercise, to increase profits behind a veneer of respectability. While hate is a group effort, as we see in Syria, love and kindness are acts of individual caring. May Gurmeet Singh and Tapeshwar Singh live long in their cocoons of love.