Hello everyone,
This is a true story and it happened to one of our friends. It is so sweet that I felt like sharing it.
"In 1983, I was engaged in porting of a big application from CDC mainframe to a small Honeywell computer for a customer in a remote place called Bibbiena near Florence, Italy. I could do the debugging work only during the night as the computer was used for accounting during the day. So, I used to do the paper work during the day and debugging after dinner till three or four in the morning. Then two three hours of nap on an easy (not so easy) chair in front of the computer and back to work.
One fine morning, at around 07:00 I woke up to find the wife of gatekeeper of the factory with a big mug of boiling hot coffee with milk and bread-butter. The same thing happened again the next morning and again. My Italian was very poor and the lady couldn't speak any English. On the third day, I was told by the gatekeeper that I was invited for lunch at their house and once there, the lady offered to wash my clothes as I was away from home and always working. I also discovered that she used to walk four km early in the morning up to a farm house to get fresh milk for my coffee. I was unable to understand why this much of attention and affection for me. After all, I was unknown to them till the other day. And when I discovered the reason behind, I was full of tears and bent my head in the face of the greatness of this elderly lady.
The story goes like this. When the allied forces entered Italy, after the battle of Monte Cassino, they started inching towards north Italy due to a very stiff resistance by the Germans. Our "masters" our "rulers" – the likes of Churchill who firmly believed in the superiority of white race, sent North Africans and other "inferior" races including Indians as advance troops to face the German machine gun fire. These poor people who left their villages to earn some money doing soldiering for the "masters" had hard time in these distant lands.
When they started advancing from Naples up to Rome to Florence and so on, many of them along with the Americans got engaged in rapes, lootings and other such things to the local population, to vent out their rage against the Germans and their Fascist allies. Many of the village girls used to hide in cattle sheds to avoid rape by North Africans and one such young girl was the lady I have mentioned before. She was in her late teens and was hiding along with other women when they were surprised by some Algerian soldiers. They would have had a very bad fate but fortunately another group of soldiers arrived and saved them from the clutches of Algerians and escorted them to a safe place. The only thing she remembered of the leader of her rescuers was that he was an Indian, had beautiful black eyes, snow white teeth, a metal bracelet in his hand (kara) and a turban on his head. Since then she had always wanted to do something for the kind people of that kind country. And finally, in me she had encountered a person from that land.
"You will understand why I am so proud to be an Indian"!!
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