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Baba’s Langar

Author: Chitleen K Sethi
Publication: The Indian Express
Date: March 25, 2012
URL: http://www.indianexpress.com/news/babas-langar/927938/0

Jagdish Lal Ahuja has been serving free meals at two Chandigarh hospitals for over a decade.

It’s 7 pm, and hundreds of people have gathered outside Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research (PGIMER), in Chandigarh, in anticipation of “baba’s langar”. As soon as a white SUV with a poster that reads “Jagdish Lal Ahuja, PGI Bhandare Wale, Chandigarh” arrives, people begin to form a neat line adjacent to the hospital’s boundary wall. Jagdish Lal Ahuja, fondly called “baba”, and a few of his helpers lay a table, place aluminium utensils on it, and begin distributing free meals, each comprising three chapattis, aaloo chana, halwa, a banana and a pack of sweets or biscuits.

This scene has been playing out every evening at PGIMER, and every afternoon at the Government Medical College campus in the city, for the last 11 years, thanks to Ahuja’s free meal service. His langar differs from traditional langars, which are organised either in gurudwaras, or by individuals in their homes to mark births, deaths, marriages, or other such ceremonies. Ahuja’s daily langars mark no such family function; instead, they serve free, but wholesome, food to relatives of patients who come from afar to the reputed hospitals for often expensive treatments.

Ahuja wasn’t inspired by a life-changing event to start the service. He was born in Peshawar, Pakistan, and migrated with his family to Patiala in 1947, when he was 14, and had just Rs 12 in his pocket. The family shifted to Chandigarh, in the early 1950s, when the city was still being developed. Ahuja, a high school graduate, sold fruits and vegetables on a handcart for over a decade in the new city, and then became a wholesale vendor at a sabzi mandi. He spent the next four decades in the mandi, during which, in 1979, he began a daily langar for children of labourers who would carry heavy gunny sacks of vegetables and fruits. “The children would help their fathers, and would often go without food. So I thought I should help them,” he says.

Now a frail 78-year-old, Ahuja has handed over his business to his children. And along with that, discontinued his langar for the mandi children in order to serve patients or their relatives at two of Chandigarh’s big hospitals. “People who come to government hospitals are the most unhappy. They have someone who is admitted there or are waiting to consult doctors. They come from all over India. They sleep on the roadside. They are often poor and have to bear the cost of treatment. Many decide to go hungry to save money. They need the food more than anyone else,” he says.

Each morning, a dozen paid helpers gather in Ahuja’s shop in the sabzi mandi to prepare the langar food, which requires one quintal of flour for 5,000 chapattis. Ahuja doesn’t tell us the cost of his service, but does emphasise that he “takes not a single penny from anyone for the langar”. “This is a duty which god has assigned to me and I will do it alone. I don’t know how much I spend on it. I don’t think about it,” he says.

His business doesn’t fund the langars. Instead, he has sold some of his properties, that he bought for a few thousand rupees in the 1960s, but are now worth crores, to fund the service. Suffering from intestinal cancer for the past few years, the baba’s langar did not take a break even when he was undergoing chemotherapy. “People come and go. That is the way of life. But if I can help it, I will not let a single person, who has queued up for my langar, go back hungry.”
 
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