Wondering what I could do to ease the pain of Covid-19 lockdown felt by millions of people, especially children, I thought of creating a website and publishing one inspiring and meaningful story every day.
For the past 25 years, I have been writing books, mostly textbooks and guides on ecology and environment for school and college students and those preparing for competitive examinations. My aim has been to create an awareness among the young about the serious environmental crisis we are facing in the world. In order to make my books interesting, I have been including many environment-related stories. As I began collecting such stories, I also looked for inspiring and meaningful stories on other aspects of life. For this website, I plan to draw stories from my collection as well as other sources.
How do I select the stories? Each story should satisfy one or more of the following criteria:
- Inspire you and perhaps nudge you to take some positive action in your life.
- Be meaningful and make you reflect on what the story means to you.
- Demonstrate the ‘Power of One’ – how ‘ordinary’ people can achieve extraordinary things.
In most cases, I would retell the story in my words. Many of the stories will be about real people or events. Some will be short versions of great stories written by gifted authors. On the whole, I would strive to offer you a variety of stories.
Wherever possible, I would add some background and further references to the story. I would not provide any critical interpretation for a story. I invite you to read a story, reflect on it, and feel whether it touches and inspires you in any way. Even if you already knew a story, I hope you would find new meaning in it when you read it now. You might like to read out or retell the story to children and also forward the link to your friends and social networks.
I invite you to:
- Comment on a story and relate how it affected you.
- Draw my attention to other such stories for inclusion in the series.
- Point out any corrections I need to make in the story.
- Flag any copyright issue, so that I can immediately delete the post or modify it.
I plan to publish a story every day for the next two months to begin with. Beyond that, there will be 2-3 stories every week.
I am launching this website on April 14, 2020 – Tamil New Year’s Day.
May all beings be happy!