the freelance philosopher

Today i am gonna smile all day.
I did not decide this when i woke up. I was on a morning stroll on the road when i saw a polio vaccination drive being undertaken at the doorsteps of a hospital in Rahulnagar,the place i live in. A few steps away there is a road to a basti, where at the start of this road there is a shop. The stair way to the shop is bound by cement verandas on both the sides. On one of the sides on a veranda there was an elderly woman sitting with a child that i assumed to be her grandson. Oblivious as she seemed she did not know about the drive (or the significance of such drives). So obviously she was sitting there busying the child with nothingness. When all of a sudden i saw a small girl in pink with a bright smile on her face. she must be around ten years old. I assumed her smiling as if she was unusually happy about something, or so i could guess from the side view of her's i managed to have. She was calling the old woman. She was waving or pointing at something . It did not take me much time to realize that she was asking the old woman to take the child to the vaccination center. Then the mere ask transformed into insistence, from insistence to persisting frenzy plead. Then fed up of the old woman's head wagging she took the onus upon herself. She picked up the child with some effort, more than what a girl would normally need. I got closer, wondering. She by now had hoisted the healthy boy on her slender hips. Then i saw it, and was overwhelmed by what i saw. It was her left arm that was inexplicably smaller and a lot more tender as compared to her right. The side of her's that i could not see earlier, had much to be seen in it. She suffered from polio herself. But happy she was to make the vaccine available to that child that i can safely presume to be her brother. Her stride was willful, her eyes were wishful. I now can understand what it was that overwhelmed me. It was the human spirit, of the pride that i feel in belonging to same species that she belongs to. I decided then that i would smile all day, as a tribute to this girl

.....er....I didn't ask her her name...
..now i am laughing at myself for that.