Food Run

Drove around this morning with a man named Krishnan who dropped out of a career in hotel management a few years ago to feed mentally and physically disabled homeless people around Madurai.

He's only 25, but he's created a little cottage charity where a bunch of different people and companies sponsor his program for one day per month (it costs him about $25 a day to feed 150 people three meals). A small staff of previously homeless people do the cooking and preparations in a little apartment (where they sleep at night), and then he goes around the city himself in a van, stopping frequently at the side of the road to serve rice and sauce wrapped in newspaper pages. Many of his regulars are schizophrenic and can't remember their own names, so he makes up names for them. When they occasionally die, he makes the funeral arrangements and pays for cremation. Infosys gave him a grant last year, and he is in the process of building a large house on the edge of the city where he says he's planning to gather these people (he refers to them as "lunatics", but in an endearing way) for rehabilitation.