Mother Teresa
Mother Teresa Home in Panjim, Goa is located at an important junction, connecting the 18th June Road and the road leading to St. Inez. St. Don Bosco School which is located nearby is an important landmark to help a visitor to find the Home for the Aged and Destitute run by the Missionaries of Charity sisters.
Many years back in late 1970s, I was a frequent visitor to this institution along with my Jesuits-run Loyola Hall pre-novitiate colleagues. We pre-novices who were also studying in Miramar-based Dhempe College offered our services to give regular hair-cuts to the poor, disabled and senior citizens inmates of the Mother Teresa Home there.On Sunday morning, soon after the weekly mass, our group of three to four pre-novice (or pre-seminary) youths used to arrive at the Mother Teresa Home equipped with aprons, pairs of scissors, shaving cream, and razors. Our sole mission was to give a new or somewhat civilised look to the male inmates who most often looked barbarian with their long disheveled, unkempt hair and long grown beards.
The nuns there, a majority of whom were Keralites or Bengalis, would entrust us with the inmates and get themselves busy catering to the large number of destitute women, children and elders living there.
The next two to three hours, we would give the inmates haircuts, shave their beards and also cut nails of their fingers and toes. One by one, the inmates would step into the wooden chairs placed before us and by the time we finished our job, they would have a complete new look as they would get haircut and shaving done only once in three months. The old, destitute persons used to look very fresh and content after the haircut and shaving.
I recalled these scenes at Mother Teresa Homes when I watched a nearly comatose patient long haired `Anand Bhai’ getting a clean, new look in Sanjay Dutt’s film `Munnabhai MBBS’.
At that time, as a teenager, I had not even started shaving myself and so as a precautionary measure for the safety of those people, I confined my services only for giving haircuts to those senior citizen destitute.
The last time I visited the Mother Teresa Home in Panjim was in early 1980s when Mother Teresa arrived in Goa for the first time after she was conferred the Nobel Peace Award. The Government of India too had later honoured her with a Bharat Ratna award.
However this time I was visiting the Missionaries of Charity Home in a different capacity. I was no longer a Jesuit pre-novice, a person attached to a religious congregation. I had arrived there as a reporter of a local English daily, The Navhind Times. The nuns at the destitute home who knew me personally were transferred and others had replaced them.
I saw the Nobel laureate sitting in a wooden chair at the same open place where we used to give haircuts to the inmates. There were not many people there. I approached Mother Teresa and as was her wont, with her folded hands, she shook hands with me and mumbled some hardly audible words. The Mother at that time was already in her seventies. I lingered around her for some time, hoping to get a good copy for my newspaper. But I was disappointed.
Mother Teresa spoke very little, almost in a whispering voice, about loving everyone, especially those in need. About being selfless and doing everything in the name of Lord! That was not exactly the content which would make page one headlines or news. While returning to my newspaper office, I wondered what would be the intro for my news copy. The Navhind Times next day carried my news story on an inside page with a photo of the Mother Teresa at the destitute home.
Of course to be honest, at that time I was not awed by her personality. The realisation of being privileged to have come in contact with Mother Teresa came only in retrospect.
Mother Teresa passed away on 5 September 1997. Fifteen years after her death, once again I came in association with the Missionaries of Charity in another role and in a foreign land, at Rome in Italy. On an Europe tour along with my wife and daughter, I stayed along with the priests belonging to the Missionaries of Charity (Male), a congregation co- founded by Mother Teresa and doing the similar work for the destitute.
We had camped at the Missionaries of Charity centre at Via S Agapito 8 in Rome for a week, I realised that the poor, destitute and the homeless in Europe are, of course, are not as those in India. They are well-dressed and when moving outside, one can hardly believe that they are inmates of the destitute centre. A majority of these destitute and homeless are alcoholics and drug addicts.
These inmates are expected to return to the centre before the supper at 7 pm as the gates of the institution are locked for them by this time. Although offered free food and shelter at centre, some of these inmates are seen on the road, famous churches, begging to earn cash to purchase liquor or drugs.
During my stay there, twice I witnessed one or inmates returning to the destitute centre past the deadline totally sozzled and therefore forced to spend the night on the road. Since this was quiet routine affair with these inmates, no compassion was shown to them, I was told.
We journalists are privileged to come in contact with veterans from various fields, power wielding politicians, senior government officials, celebrities, and so on. Often, we tend to view them with cynicism.
Pope John Paul II canonised Mother Teresa, making her the first person to be declared a saint in a shortest period after her death. Incidentally. Pope John Paul himself became the second person to be declared a saint posthumously in a shortest duration.
Both Mother Teresa and Pope John Paul are the two saints I observed from a very close distance during their lifetimes and as a journalist, covered their functions for my newspaper.
Camil Parkhe
