Cuttack: The coronavirus-induced lockdown has brought out the Good Samaritan in many. Barsha Mohanty – a sub-inspector attached to Cuttack Mahila police station is among them.
Her humanitarian nature came to fore when a video featuring her feeding a mentally challenged old woman at Dargah Bazaar Chowk in Cuttack recently went viral. She has since been receiving appreciations from various quarters for her noble deed.
Police were distributing food packets at Dargah Bazaar Thursday night at about 8:30pm when an old woman, sitting in a corner, suddenly came onto the road. A policeman went up to her and tried to persuade her to go to a side while giving her a food packet. But she neither accepted the packet nor budged from the middle of the road. Rather she sat there.
It took no time to the cops, who were distributing food packets, to realise that the woman is a mentally challenged one. Out of fear, many did not go near her.
Barsha, who was watching all this from a distance, could not restrict herself from approaching the woman.
“From the very first look at her face, I realised that she was hungry. I asked her if she required some food but she chose to be silent. Then I tried to feed her something. I unwrapped the food packet, placed it before her, and started feeding her while patting her back all the while. She was speaking Hindi. To eat a little amount of food, she took more than the usual time. It seemed to me that despite her being hungry she was reluctant to accept food from us,” she said.
“Later, I gave her a packet of biscuit and a water bottle. By that time the distribution had finished and I returned home,” she added.
Barsha says she could not sleep that night. The question of why she did not accept food from them despite the fact that she was hungry kept her awake all night long.
Prior to her posting at Mahila police station she had served at Markat Nagar and Badambadi police stations. Her husband Gyanaranjan Mohapatra is an ASI at Dhauli police station, on the outskirt of Bhubaneswar.
PNN
