India needs you now! Will you help?

Two weeks ago I found out through a friend how the pandemic was shaping and affecting India, my home, my loved ones. My immediate family members had been hiding this reality from me for weeks, as they didn't want to imbalance my peace "trying to do it all" - taking care of my son, and work, and home. Rightfully so, as what could "I" do, sitting more than 6,000 miles away from home.

So naturally when I learned about the devastation in India, I went through the five stages of grief. But I didn't unload my grief on the already grieving, aka, my immediate family. Thank god! This time I looked to my network on LinkedIn, Twitter for support, hope and inspiration.

I reached out to my community in US, and around the world to brainstorm, think of ways to contribute back. And I got the support - my friends and colleagues acted as care givers, suppliers and most of all, thought partners who helped me channel my energy to think of creative ways of applying technology to solve the challenge in locating critical supplies in India at a time when you need it most.

"We cannot predict the value our work will provide to the world. That’s fine. It is not our job to judge our own work. It is our job to create it, to pour ourselves into it, and to master our craft as best we can." - @James Clear

And in my quest to give back to my home and support my family in India, I got connected to this amazing community of volunteers at CovidFYI . They welcomed me and encouraged me to share ideas, and contribute to the code and discussions :) This community of volunteers from Coronasafe, Swasth Alliance, and many others are ordinary folks like you and me, but are making extraordinary impact on saving lives through power of commitment, grit and dedication. If you are motivated to contribute, please join the discussion on slack and check out the GitHub repo.

There are men and women who make the world better just by being the kind of people they are -- and that too is a kind of commitment. They have the gift of kindness or courage or loyalty or integrity. It matters very little whether they're behind the wheel of a truck or running a country store or bringing up a family. - John W Gardner, from Personal Renewal Speech

Working with a community who are on the ground battling the risk of contracting the virus every single day, and witnessing them still come together, make changes, shape ideas, code and deploy tools every day is nothing short of a booster shot of hope! I mean truly, it is the most surreal, humbling experience to contribute to a tool that is used by billions of people in India to locate Oxygen, Medicine, Plasma, Hospital bed and critical supplies. In just the last four days this team went live with several features, for example, search for food, twitter feed for medicines, integration with google maps and many more.

Thanks for reading this post till the end, I hope I have shared some inspiration and positivity with you. I know it's not enough, but hey, it's at least a little bit better.

PS. If you'd like to make a difference please check out this list of verified resources to give back to India.

PPS. I update this list regularly, so do check back later!