Charity: Is this something we have forgotten about?
It's going to be an year at Microsoft for me. Since this is my first year at the company, I keep discovering new things every now then. So when the month of October came along, so came along the "month of giving".
Microsoft has a strong culture of being involved in charitable and philanthropic endeavors. Its founder Bill Gates is known for mainly for two major things, first he found Microsoft and second he is a philanthropist to core. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has contributed immensely to improving health care and eradicating poverty around the world. The influence of such a philanthropic personality inside Microsoft rubs off on most of the employees at Microsoft. From senior Vice President of engineering to my directors, everyone pushes their teams to donate generously to some charitable cause. Not only employees can contribute a part of their salaries to any charitable cause but Microsoft goes one step ahead in matching their contributions for the cause.
Somehow, the art of giving took a backseat for me in last few years. Before today morning, I was happy to have contributed my share of 50$ for the charitable trust helping the victims of hurricane Michael on east coast of United States. But I was humbled to learn that my collogues were pooling in sums of hundreds of dollars via silent auctions. When I followed the laughter immerging from the office breakroom, I found that people were pledging contribution of hundreds of dollars via a fun game of auction. I felt a sense of shame that I had forgotten my duty of giving back in all these years.
Today, I remembered the time in year 2002 when I contributed a handsome sum for the victims in Gujrat riots when no other classmate of mine contributed even a close enough amount. I also remembered that almost every quarter in the year I would step out for a few hours from my office at Cisco Systems to participate in some volunteer work like packaging food for hunger striven people (via Second Harvest) and writing meaningful captions for pictures to help visually impaired people understand details in pictures. I also remembered today my father contributes to education of one non-privileged child every year and that after the passing away of my grandmother, my grandfather donated a sizable amount of money to the cause of girl education in my hometown of Delhi.
I participated in the silent auction and like my collogues I managed to promise more that just 50$ to the charitable causes via the auction. I was happy the art of giving was still alive inside me and that I could rediscover this very year in the month of October.
