Send This Girl Your Old Magazines, Please!

I got this from writer Annie Zaidi's blog post My country, this calm morning which is a sort of Independence Day message from a girl, Sheetal Ramji Barde, asking readers to send old magazines to her. She makes envelopes from these magazine pages to earn whatever she can after her father committed suicide, one of the increasing cases of suicides by farmers about which I have written here before:

"I was barely nine when my dear father committed suicide. My mother has worked really hard to send my brother, sister & me to school. She is still working hard to make our two ends meet... all she wants is ONE OLD MAGAZINE from you all, so she can make paper envelopes to earn & save environment...

"Dear uncles & aunties,

"Please-please do send us one old magazine every month to support us, so that we can go to better schools and live our lives with dignity and less suffering. My mother and other widow mothers like her will not hesitate to work hard to earn for us while saving the environment for the nation... I will be waiting with great expectations dear uncles & aunties for ONE OLD MAGAZINE from each one of you every month... If each one of you send one, it will become so many for my mother and other widow mothers to work hard to earn some amount every month... A very BIG THANK YOU from my brother, sister, my mother and me..."

"SHEETAL RAMJI BARDE

Our address:

Support 4 suicide farmers families

House No: 200

Opp: Dr. Harne's Hospital

Dhantoli Chowk

Wardha: 442001"

Incidentally friend Harini Calamur's movie Jhing Chik, Jhing, which I have been meaning to see for a long, long time is also about farmer suicides. A review of the movie appears on Poonam Sharma's blog here.