Help Laxmi Gautam to provide a home to the widows in Vrindavan
Even the police of Vrindavan call for Lakshmi Gautam when they see an old woman on the streets or an unclaimed female body. She works for dignity and rights of widows in the birthplace of Lord Krishna — Vrindavan. These women have no place to go back to and nobody to call their own. These are women who have either been abandoned by their families or have come to Vrindavan for spiritual reasons. Though thousands of people visit Vrindavan’s temples every day, nobody bothers about these women.
“I am the daughter of Vrindavan. Since childhood, I have seen these women on the road, just sitting and waiting for their death. They had no place to go to or food to eat. They begged for two morsels of food. They were treated differently just because they were widows. I always wondered what sins they committed that they had to end their lives like this? After death, nobody cared to conduct their last rites. I then took it upon myself to try to improve their condition,” says Laxmi.
A young girl being brought up in the family of ‘teerth purohit’ (priest) in the lanes of Vrindavan always had queries whenever she saw women wearing white sarees with their heads shaven. “As my father was a religious person, I was curious about these widows having shaven heads, wearing white sarees and deprived of worldly pleasures. At the age of 8, I got the answers to my questions from a 70-year-old widow,” she recalls. “I lost my husband when I was your age, is what the woman replied when I asked her this question,” says Gautam. “This moved me and I started thinking of doing something for the widows. This brought a change in me but I continued with my studies and won gold medal in history from Agra University. I completed PhD in History and Hindi before joining the Institute of Oriental Philosophy, Vrindavan, as associate professor,” she says.