RI Vice President, 2026-27
RI Director, 2025-27
Whenever I ask a club to tell me about their best project, nobody begins with the amount they spent. They begin with a person or a place — a newborn saved in a neonatal ward, a pond restored, a child back in class, a government school for girls that finally has clean washrooms. The figures come later, almost as an afterthought. I think that tells us what giving really means to a Rotarian.
There is an episode in the Ramayana, found in our regional retellings rather than in Valmiki’s original. As the vanaras hauled boulders into the sea to build the bridge to Lanka, a squirrel kept dipping itself in the water, rolling in the sand, and shaking the grains among the stones. Some of them laughed at it. Rama did not. He lifted the squirrel into his hand and stroked its back. The squirrel could not carry a boulder. It carried what it could. When the bridge stood, it was made of both, sand and boulders.
Our Foundation is built the same way. No single Rotarian pays for a neonatal ward, a restored pond, a child’s schooling, or washrooms in a government girls’ school in a district far from their own. What happens is quieter than that. Your contribution leaves your hand, joins thousands of others, and comes back as a grant that someone you will never meet puts to work. You may never see the village. The village will never know your name. But the work gets done.
This is why I find the word ‘donation’ inadequate. A donation is something you give away. What we do through our Foundation is closer to taking responsibility for a problem too large for one person, one club or one district to solve alone, and agreeing to carry our share of it.
The ways are already familiar to you. The Annual Fund, Endowment Fund, PolioPlus Fund, and increasingly CSR partnerships, which in India hold far more promise than we have used so far. Choose whichever suits your capacity. The choice matters much less than the decision to give at all, and to keep giving.
I remember thinking it was too small to be of any use when I opened my account with TRF with $100, 25 years ago. I was wrong. What mattered was not the size of that first cheque but that I kept adding to it, year after year. That account now stands at $475,000.
To a young Rotarian or Rotaractor reading this: do not wait until you can give what you consider a respectable amount. Give now, give what is comfortable, and let the habit grow with you. The Foundation has lasted more than 100 years on exactly this arithmetic.
Nowhere is this truer than in our fight against polio. It is now 47 years since Rotary took up this cause, beginning with a single immunisation project in the Philippines in 1979. Together with our partners, we have helped reduce polio cases worldwide by more than 99 per cent. Today, we are only a few miles from the finish. These last miles are the hardest and the costliest, and they will be covered the same way the bridge was built — one contribution at a time. Please stand with the End Polio mission, as a club and as an individual. We have come this far together. Let us not stop now.
November is Foundation Month, and we will hear a good deal about targets. I urge you to hold a different picture in your mind this year. Somewhere a bridge is being built — against polio, illiteracy, disease, against the distance between what people need and what they can reach. You may not be able to carry a boulder. Carry what you can. Keep giving!
M Muruganandam
RI Vice President, 2026-27
RI Director, 2025-27