The things we take for granted are often things that we never realize until that thing it's shown to someone who's never experienced it and we get to see their reaction. For Sita, a young woman from Mumbai India she experienced so many things through the pictures and magazines. She began to wonder if it was all real, if in faraway places women had the rights and the abilities to do things that were not available to her and the women where she was growing up. Nonetheless she loved her family and appreciated everything that her parents had done for her but the more she read and the more she learned the more she thought that she could leave India and learn amazing things to bring back and make the country stronger for its women. Unfortunately, her father did not agree with this. In some places what the father says is the expectation of what will be. But Sita gathered her strength and courage to go against her father and attend college in London. Years later when she finished her degree and had read in her mind as many books as she could get her hands on she stood on stage the day of graduation wanting nothing more than to see her family in the audience. And just as she walked across the stage like the most perfect of pictures, she sees the silhouette of someone who she believes is her mother. This is a beautiful story emphasizing the recognition that everyone is coming from a different place and those places have different moral standards and we should learn as much as we can from as many people who are different than us. In this we should also recognize that the power of individuality is very very strong. Because sometimes you'll find that you were biggest love, our biggest support in life is with you but only in silence.
In Silence
I saw a picture once have a beautiful woman and her beautiful daughters standing on a very high hill right in front of what felt like the Tree of Life. I looked at all of the faces. Have you ever just looked at a picture and taken it in? Searching every crease and every angle of these women’s faces and I wondered, I really wondered if these women were as happy as this picture portrayed them to be? If the background were different, tree was removed and behind it was a mud hut and instead of grass it was a dry land, instead of the woman and her daughters being beautiful they were sad and barefoot. Something as simple as a smile, it can change everything. Something as simple as the addition of a tree that looks larger than life, something from nature that was purposefully set right behind us so that at some point in its existence beautiful pictures could be taken. I spent a lot of my time as a child and growing up in Mumbai looking at pictures from all over the world. And I just wondered, where any of them real or is this just the presentation that we put on so that people in places on the other side of the world think that we are happy, and our nature and resources are plentiful. I'll never forget the picture of that woman and her children, a beautiful simple picture of all women, beautiful happy women.