Pick a Fight – A poem

It is time

It is time

Life is so great,
Why should you wait?
You are a hero,
Go show some bravo!
The light will shine bright,
If we decide to pick a fight!!

Few of us are not so lucky,
Want to make them happy?
Then this is your chance,
Their dreams we can enhance!
The possibilities are infinite,
Let us all pick a fight!!

This is your life’s journey,
Are you going to live it fully?
Find out what interests you,
We have a lot on our menu!!
Let your hopes rise like a kite,
Big or small, but pick a fight!!

You can make a difference,
Light the world with brilliance!
Step outside of your shadow,
But don’t wait for tomorrow!
A new fire let us today ignite,
This is our chance to pick a fight!!

It’s time to welcome the new,
If not me and you, then who?
Let us create a new future,
Which is sweet and not bitter!
Together we must all unite,
Now is the time to pick a fight!!

P.S. – Visit http://www.pickafight.in for more details..

Volunteering, What It Can Do For You?

Volunteering has a meaningful impact on your community. It contributes to the overall social and economic health of the community, as people are engaged positively into contributing for disadvantaged sections of society. It could range from visiting the sick, planting a tree or advocating for human rights. But apart from the benefits to the society, we most often miss the benefits it can have for the person who is volunteering. Here are some ways how volunteering can benefit you –

Learn new Skills
Volunteering can help us learn more skills and makes us aware of our hidden skills. We can help organize a fundraising event, do an awareness event, or teach students in a school. By doing this we can improve our goal setting, planning or budgeting skills. It also helps us to improve our decision making skills and contribute to personal change by affecting our beliefs about day to day behavior of people. If you always had a hobby and you wanted to know if you should pursue it, you can volunteer with your skills to see for yourself whether you enjoy doing it or not, or where you stand in that skill. For example, taking initiatives like ‘No Waste‘ and ‘Dandi March‘ has certainly made a huge difference to my people management and leadership skills.

Volunteer for Yourself

Volunteer for Yourself

Sense of Fulfillment
When we volunteer, we give our time and skills generously by choice. There is no anxiety and stress as we have made the decision all by ourself. Therefore, volunteering gives us the highest level of accomplishment and a sense of fulfillment. Whenever I have helped others, I have always felt joy and I think it is the same with all human beings. Even after working on something physically stressful while volunteering, people always feel stress-free, relaxed and more alive after doing it. And irrespective of the outcome, the knowledge of contributing to a good cause is always rewarding.

Wider Perspective
In our busy day to day lives, volunteering can help us create some stability in our lives. The confidence and experience gained from volunteering can be helpful in seeing workplace issues in a different perspective. We discover new traits of our personality and can reach for new levels of performance at the workplace too. For me, meeting people from different age groups and different professions has given me the ability to put my world in perspective with so much other stuff happening which I was totally unaware of earlier. It has also helped me improve my social and interpersonal skills. Volunteering can help anybody get out of the ‘rat race’ and create a balance in their lives.

Connecting with others
When you volunteer, you will meet new people from different walks and segments of the society. These contacts can be valuable in establishing business contacts or for seeking employment in the future. Meeting people and making new friends increase the feeling of relatedness with the community, and is rewarding intrinsically. People and societies depend on each other for survival but commercialism and consumerism have seen people getting more and more individualistic. What better way to connect and give something back to your community than volunteering.

Nobody can do everything, but everyone can do something

Nobody can do everything, but everyone can do something

“A candle loses nothing by lighting another” is a popular quote by James Keller. We can not give something (out of free will) without getting something in return. When we give our time and skills to another, it is like lighting a candle. We don’t lose anything, but gain more light (knowledge). Volunteering always leaves us richer in spirit, happiness, skills and takes away your problems, stress and anxiety. If you have not spend time volunteering till now, do so. It is certainly one of the things you must experience sooner than later. For volunteering opportunities, see this initiative (Pick A Fight) I am taking with a few of my friends.

Introducing Pick A Fight

“Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it”Helen Keller

Today, we are living in a world full of joy and sorrows. While, at one end, we are making new progress with every passing day with breakthroughs in science and technology, we are still struggling from grave problems like poverty, corruption, child abuse, etc. All of us are fighting our own battle. A fight for survival, to earn more money, to ensure a better future for our family, and so on. Many individuals and organizations are also fighting for the greater good and issues which affect all of us as a society.

Pick a fight, Make a difference

Pick a fight, Make a difference

Pick a Fight is a platform to connect those who are fighting for a cause and looking for help with people who are willing to help. A fight could be an NGO fighting for women empowerment, a company working towards green drives like sapling planting, an individual taking an initiative in his locality, apartment, etc or a group of people (RWA, friends) who have come together to fight for some cause.

If you want to help and stand for a cause, Pick a Fight is the place to be. We aspire to have all the information of different fights people are fighting for.  It will be the one stop destination to seek help and offer help. Help could be in the form of giving your time to volunteer, giving away resources like old clothes or books, or donating money towards a cause.

Pick a Fight is the brainchild of Anupama Sharma, a software professional working in Bangalore. Here is what she has to say, in her own words –

“I had just come back from a wonderful day at an orphanage and was narrating the event to a friend when he exclaimed that he would have loved to be a part of it. He asked me the address of the orphanage and was surprised to find out that he had been living close to the orphanage all these years and did not even knew about it. That is when it occurred to me that there are ample people who want to help and many others who need help, and I saw that as an opportunity to connect them. Very soon two of my friends joined me, and I am sure many more will join in the coming days. Our objective is to create a new culture of giving and helping through PickaFight.”

I will be helping her to make Pick a Fight a success and inculcate a new culture of giving and helping. If you want to be a part of it or contribute in any way, contact Anupama at anupama@pickafight.in, Ketan at ketan@pickafight.in or myself at sumit@pickafight.in

You can find Pick A Fight on Facebook and Twitter. Like / Follow these pages to stay updated about our activities. Our website is all set for a launch on 15 May.