Three thousand stitches
A Pearls of Wisdom Collection from Sudha Murty's Life.
This was the first time I was reading Sudha Murty and whatever I had heard about her writing was not just enough. She really has a magic in her pen and a midas touch in words. The stories were made so interesting that one cannot leave without completing.
The story collection of Three Thousand Stitches is a set of true stories and incidences lived by Sudha Murty in her life. Some of them are experiences that impacted her way of thinking while others are the great work done under her leadership with Infosys Foundation.
Though the book has 11 such touching stories, few of them were really shaking the human behaviour and our beliefs.
The story about her father helping a young village girl during her pregnancy. He helped the girl escape post delivery because her family might have killed her. She was a mother without marriage and she belonged to an Orthodox family. Post escape she never met the doctor and neither the doctor remembered the case. But after decades doctor who is the father of Sudha Murty is incidentally meeting the girl he operated for delivery. The girl was now well settled in life, had a great job as a nurse and her child was a lady gynecologist. The hospital they were running was named after the name of father of Sudha Murty.
One more touching story was about the workers in middle East those who went to th at country to seek fortunes but their employers were giving them tough time, making them live in inhumane conditions. Their passports were in possession of their masters. Each of the victim had a very heart touching story of their life. One of the NGO was helping such indians by securing their passports from embassy and crowdsourcing for their tickets back to home. Sudha Murty promised to sponsor such air tickets and delayed her plans of Infosys Foundation's own office premises.
Sudha Murty along with their NGO Infosys Foundation works round the clock with various non profit organizations for betterment of society , even after that she finds time to write stories and she travels to interact with students. When questioned about how come she is so busy, she took her best friend for a day at Infosys Foundation, she made her feel about how busy is she and her NGO the whole year and not just a day.
The story about her grand children was a fun . She told them mythology story of Krishna and his Vrindavan leela with Gopikas and another story of of Akshay Patra. Her grand children changed the story while keeping the same plot. The grand kids changed the river with swimming pool and gopikas choli were changed to swimming costume in the new version. Her grand children are in UK. She narrated the context and how it changes if the country changes.
The last story in the book would also shake you up with alcoholic de addiction process of an organization called AA, Alcoholic Anonymous. The story started with a girl having high rated academic credentials but low confidence to talk and express. When Sudha ji asked the reason, she told the story of her childhood and how her liquor addict father was making their family's life miserable. Sudha Murty tried to understand the problem of such alcoholic addiction with another such person in her reference. To further study she listened to his story of how the addiction started and how he came out of this life threatening and anti social anti family habit of alcohol drinking. The NGO called AA has taken an socio scientific path for de addiction of such people.
Some of stories are good to read but less you can take home from them but since it is from Sudha Murty, you can't miss to read them all.
