Source: www.themindunleashed.org | Original Post Date: November 10, 2015 –

We all look for inspiration, and sometimes it comes from the most gut-wrenching experience imaginable. Narayanan was a five-star chef, set to embark on a career feeding Michelin-caliber guests at high-priced tables when his life took an unexpected turn.

The 29-year old wakes up before dawn, and travels over 200 kilometers to feed people in Madurai, Tamil Nadu. The people Krishnan feeds don’t have black Amex cards, nor do they stay in swanky hotels. They are all homeless.

This amazing man feeds more than 400 destitute people every day, often with his own, bare hands. He even offers those that need it a free haircut, and even a bath if they care for one.

His abrupt change in life plans all started when he visited a temple just before he was about to leave for Switzerland to work for a prestigious hotel as a gourmet chef. Outside the temple Krishnan observed a man eating excrement off the street due to extreme hunger, and he vowed to make a change however he could. This sight unsettled Krishnan so much that he brought the man a bowl of rice, and later quit his job at a 5-star hotel.This amazing man feeds more than 400 destitute people every day, often with his own, bare hands. He even offers those that need it a free haircut, and even a bath if they care for one.

“I saw a very old man, literally eating his own human waste out of hunger. I went to the nearby hotel and asked them what was available. They had idli, which I bought and gave to the old man. Believe me, I had never seen a person eating so fast, ever. As he ate the food, his eyes were filled with tears. Those were the tears of happiness.” – Narayanan Krishnan

Since then, Krishnan has fed more than a million homeless people food which is likely good enough to feed dignitaries and the uber wealthy.

“We feed the homeless, mentally ill, destitute, and old people who are ignored by society regardless of their religion, cast or any other factors, everyone is equal. To serve such people keeps me going day in and day out. They should feel psychologically that they are also human beings and they deserve human care. The food that we give them provides the physical nutrition, love, and affection shows the mental nutrition. The ultimate purpose of life is to give. Start giving and you will feel the joy of giving. This keeps me going.”

Once a rising star in the culinary world, Krishnan dedicates his life to feeding the ‘least’ among us. In India, the homeless and mentally infirm are considered untouchables, but he touches people’ lives every day. Where Krishnan lives and works, no man will go hungry.

What does Krishnan say about all this? “I am just a human being.”

About the Author

Christina Sarich is a musician, yogi, humanitarian and freelance writer who channels many hours of studying Lao Tzu, Paramahansa Yogananda, Rob Brezny, Miles Davis, and Tom Robbins into interesting tidbits to help you Wake up Your Sleepy Little Head, and *See the Big Picture*. Her blog is Yoga for the New World . Her latest book is Pharma Sutra: Healing The Body And Mind Through The Art Of Yoga.

SHENZHEN, China (AP) — Rescuers were searching Monday for at least 91 missing people a day after a mountain of excavated soil and construction waste buried dozens of buildings when it swept through an industrial park in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen.

China's official Xinhua News Agency said the landslide buried or damaged 33 buildings in the industrial park in Shenzhen, a major manufacturing center in Guangdong province across the border from Hong Kong that makes products used around the world ranging from cellphones to cars.

Aerial photos on the microblog of the Public Security Ministry's Firefighting Bureau showed the area awash in a sea of red mud, with several buildings either knocked on their side or collapsed entirely.

Posts on the microblog said mud had thoroughly infused many of the buildings, leaving the "room of survival extremely small."

Just seven people were rescued overnight and 13 overall were hospitalized, including three with life-threatening injuries, according to state broadcaster China Central Television, or CCTV, which cited rescue leaders.

Persistent rain fell in the area on Monday, although it wasn't clear whether that was hampering rescue efforts.

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Rescuers search for survivors on a damaged building following a landslide in Shenzhen, in south Chin …

Cellphone camera video of the noontime Sunday disaster run by CCTV showed the massive wall of debris slamming into the buildings and sending up huge plumes of dust.

Details are beginning to emerge about the cause of the landslide, which authorities say covered an area of 100,000 square meters (1 million square feet) with up to 6 meters (20 feet) of mud.

The Ministry of Land and Resources said the debris originated with a steep, man-made mountain of dirt, cement chunks and other construction waste that had been piled up against a 100-meter (330-foot) -high hill over the past two years.

Heavy rains in the region had saturated the soil, making it increasingly unstable and ultimately causing it to collapse with massive force.

"The pile was too big, the pile was too steep, leading to instability and collapse," the ministry said, adding that the original, natural hill remained intact.

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In this photo released by China's Xinhua News Agency, an evacuated boy rests at a makeshift shel …

The Ministry said it had dispatched additional personnel to help monitor the situation and guard against a second collapse.

The 33 damaged or collapsed buildings included 14 factories, two office buildings, one cafeteria, three dormitories and 13 sheds or workshops, Shenzhen Deputy Mayor Liu Qingsheng said at a news conference.

Nearly 1,500 people were involved in the rescue efforts, aided by 151 cranes, backhoes and other construction equipment, along with rescue dogs and specialized life-detecting equipment.

CCTV said Chinese President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang issued orders to make rescuing those trapped the top priority.

The initial landslide sparked an explosion in a section of a natural gas pipeline owned by PetroChina, the country's top oil and gas producer. By Monday morning, the fire was extinguished and a temporary section of pipe was being laid.

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People look as rescuers searching for survivors on a collapsed buildings following a landslide in Sh …

Xinhua said that as of Monday morning, 59 men and 32 women were missing in the landslide. No deaths were reported yet.

Li Yikang, the deputy secretary general of the Shenzhen city government, said at a televised news conference that more than 900 people had been evacuated and moved to local schools and community centers.

Ren Jiguang, the deputy chief of Shenzhen's public security bureau, told CCTV that most people had been moved to safety before the landslide hit.

State media carried photos of what looked like at least one five-story building leaning over and partly crumpled in the industrial park, and a sea of brown soil covering a vast area around it.

The landslide is the fourth major disaster to strike China this year following a deadly New Year's Day stampede in Shanghai, the capsizing of a cruise ship in the Yangtze River and a massive explosion at a chemicals warehouse in Tianjian on the coast near Beijing.

Human error has been suspected or confirmed in all three previous disasters, pointing to an often callous attitude toward safety in China despite the threat of harsh penalties.

Three decades of headlong economic growth have been catching up with China in terms of safety and damage to the environment. Many of the country's major cities suffer from chronic air pollution. A four-day smog red alert continued in Beijing on Monday, forcing schools to close, factories to curtail production and half the city's cars off the roads.

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In the late 1980s, when journalist John Conroy first began investigating claims that a decorated Chicago police detective named Jon Burge was torturing criminal suspects on the South Side, he found it virtually impossible to get his hands on police misconduct records without a court order.

Conroy’s coverage of the Burge torture allegations in the Chicago Reader, the city’s alt-weekly, would lead to the detective’s dismissal from the force in 1993 — following an internal Police Department review determining that he had tortured suspects — and Burge’s eventual conviction in 2010 on felony charges of perjury and obstruction of justice for denying his use of torture under oath. (He was released in 2014 and is now living in Florida on a police pension).

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In this June 8, 2010 file photo, former Chicago Police Lt. Jon Burge arrives at the federal building in Chicago. …

Now, 25 years after publishing the first of many articles exposing Burge’s tangled web of abuse and secrecy — as the U.S. Justice Department sets out to investigate allegations of systemic violence and racism going unpunished within the Chicago Police Department — Conroy is part of a fight to stop the Chicago Police Department from destroying decades' worth of what he says are documents that could free scores of innocent prisoners.

Specifically at risk are complaints and records relating to every investigation of police misconduct dating back to 1967. The trove of data was requested by the Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times under the Freedom of Information Act last year, following an Illinois judge’s ruling in favor of journalist Jamie Kalven in another FOIA case holding that the public has a right to know which police officers have been accused of misconduct and whether and how they were disciplined.

Somewhat unexpectedly, the city agreed to hand over the records, but the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police wasn't having it, arguing that the union’s contract allows complaints against officers to be destroyed after five years.

The police union received a temporary injunction to prevent the release of any records from before 2011 until a union arbitrator could weigh in on the matter. Last month, a labor arbitrator sided with the Chicago Police Benevolent & Protective Association, the union representing high-ranking officers, ordering that the files of lieutenants, captains and sergeants be “purged” from any city government online databases.

Now, as the Chicago Police Department prepares to have its practices scrutinized by federal investigators, another arbitrator is expected to make a similar ruling in the FOP’s case, which calls for the destruction of decades’ worth of potentially incriminating misconduct reports.

“There are people who have been in prison for more than 20 years who may have been wrongfully convicted, who have been wrongfully convicted,” Conroy told Yahoo News, referring to the 100-plus convicts who say they were sent to prison based on a coerced confession obtained through abuse by Burge or one of the detectives under his command. Their cases are awaiting review by the Illinois Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission, created in 2009 to determine which Burge-related cases merit a retrial.

“Were all these old files destroyed, we would be consigning innocent people to prison, many of them for decades more and perhaps the rest of their lives,” Conroy continued. “This would be criminal.”

Jamie Kalven’s attorney, Craig Futterman, who serves on the commission, said justice for the victims of Burge and his associates rests on the decades’ worth of misconduct reports the police want to destroy.

“What’s at stake? Police accountability,” Futterman said. “People sitting in prison who claim that they’ve been tortured, officers who’ve been accused of abuse who are still out there. All evidence or documentation of that is at risk of being destroyed forever.”

FOP president Dean Angelo did not return multiple requests for comment on this story.

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Chicago police Officer Jason Van Dyke arrives for a court hearing at Leighton Criminal Court Building in Chicago, …

McDonald was one of the 409 people who’ve been shot by Chicago police officers since 2007 — 127 of them fatally — according to the city’s Independent Police Review Authority.

According to the records Kalven has managed to obtain (he’s published 56,000 police complaints from the Chicago Police Department spanning the years from 2002 to 2008 and 2011 to 2015 in an online database at the Invisible Institute), before Van Dyke was arrested for killing McDonald, he had been the subject of at least 20 misconduct complaints, none of which resulted in discipline.

Civil rights attorney Flint Taylor argues that records like Van Dyke’s are proof of the need for public access to misconduct reports. It shows, Taylor says, that the city's history of police violence does not necessarily start and stop with Burge and his so-called “Midnight Crew.”

Taylor, who has represented several Burge torture victims and others who claim to have been wrongly convicted and sent to prison or death row, said he and other civil rights lawyers have been engaged in “a running battle for decades” against what he called the Chicago FOP’s “unremitting attack on transparency.”

This October, Taylor filed a lawsuit on behalf of three men who say they were wrongfully imprisoned after being “physically and psychologically” abused into providing false confessions by Chicago police officers at the Homan Square interrogation facility. An explosive investigation published by the Guardian newspaper in February describes Homan Square as more like a CIA “black site” than a police precinct, a secretive warehouse where suspects are allegedly subjected to beatings and prolonged shackling, are denied the right to legal counsel and are not booked in any official CPD databases.

Taylor’s lawsuit — the third of its kind relating to alleged abuses at Homan Square since the Guardian published the first in its series of exposes — alleges that clients Atheris Mann, Jessie Patrick and Deanda Wilson were denied access to water, food and bathrooms, as well as the right to contact their families or an attorney, while being interrogated at the facility. Wilson says an officer held a knife to his throat. Mann and Patrick, Mann’s stepson, say they were subjected to full strip searches, shackled to a bench and berated with a series of threats and racial slurs.

The Chicago Police Department has repeatedly denied the allegations made about Homan Square in the Guardian and elsewhere, maintaining that suspects interviewed at the West Side facility are treated no differently than anyone else arrested by Chicago police. Department representatives denied an invitation to testify at a Cook County Commission hearing about the alleged abuses at Homan Square last week.

Taylor said he was disappointed when, in response to a reporter’s question at a press conference last week, Attorney General Loretta Lynch said the Justice Department’s forthcoming investigation of the Chicago Police Department would not include the recent allegations of unlawful detention at Homan Square.

While the claims of abuse at the facility “are extremely important, they’re not at this time in the purview of our investigation,” Lynch said. “At this point in time it is a use of force investigation.”

For Taylor and other civil rights attorneys who had previously called on the U.S. Justice Department to investigate unlawful patterns and practices within the Chicago Police Department, in 1999 and again in 2010, to no avail, last week’s announcement that the DOJ would finally be investigating the department was long overdue. Still, Taylor said, the investigation’s apparent narrow scope and lack of interest — at least initially — in the kinds of extensive allegations that have arisen from Homan Square, leaves him with only “guarded optimism” about the DOJ’s ability to effectively weed out systemic wrongdoing and enforce accountability.

“You can’t look at a city in pieces like that,” Taylor said. “You can't look at the police department and its misconduct and compartmentalize. You have to look at it across the board in order to have any kind of meaningful reform.”

Taylor and others, including Craig Futterman and attorneys with Northwestern University’s Roderick and Solange MacArthur Justice Center — where John Conroy now works as an investigator — followed up on Lynch’s announcement with a complaint to the Justice Department. The complaint applauds the DOJ probe and urges investigators to specifically “examine the failures of the disciplinary system to respond seriously to not only shootings but all acts of police brutality in general.”

The Justice Department also declined to comment on whether it plans to intervene in the police unions’ effort to destroy the misconduct records that Conroy, Taylor and other reform advocates are seeking.

At this point, Futterman said, there’s not really anything else the public or the press can do to obtain those records. Earlier this month, he and Kalven called on Illinois Circuit Court Judge Patrick Flynn to overturn the union arbitrator’s decision, arguing that the records are not a labor issue but a matter of public concern.

Flynn declined, but did issue an emergency order requiring the Chicago police to notify activists and press before destroying misconduct records.

“They have to give us two weeks' notice, but that doesn't mean we can stop it,” Futterman said. “We will just know.”

“The best thing that can be done would be for the Illinois Legislature to act and simply amend the Local Records Act to say government agencies shall not destroy records related to complaints of police misconduct and their investigations,” Futterman said.

But, he added, “it's critically important that they act before the records are gone.” So far, no bills have been proposed to make this change.

In the meantime, the city could appeal the first arbitrator’s decision within 90 days of the ruling but, with just over 60 days left, has not indicated any plans to do so.

A spokesperson for the city did not respond to repeated requests for comment on whether Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s office plans to take legal action to prevent these police misconduct records from being destroyed.

“It’s ultimately the mayor’s call,” Futterman said. “The clock is ticking.”

Fight over handling of police misconduct files

Journalists are attempting to halt the destruction of decades worth of Chicago police records.
Could free innocent prisoners