While most of us walk into restaurants and pig out, we somehow, very conveniently ignore people begging outside restaurants, waiting for a meal to satiate their hunger. The owner of Indian Fusion, Parkash Chhibber certainly doesn’t belong to this club.
Indian Fusion, a Canadian restaurant in Edmonton, Alberta, put up a sign on their backdoor that sends out an invitation for anyone who is in need of food, to walk into the restaurant and have a meal for free.
Not only have they kept vegetarian and non-vegetarian food preferences in mind, they have also taken food allergies into account.
“I have seen enough hunger in the past,” Parkash Chhibber told The Huffington Post.
“I know the pain of not having food.”
Chhibber’s restaurant has been running since 2009 and he has been giving out free meals for the past two years, though the sign has only been up for six months.
“I thought, how many people can I go and ask, ‘Are you hungry?’ It’s not possible. So I thought, why not put up a sign? In case someone is hungry,” he told CTV.
The respond varies – at times he serves free meals to 3-10 people and at times, no one rings the bell.
But thanks to Daniella Tintinaglia, an Edmonton local, who took notice of the sign and posted it on Imgur, the news has traveled to millions.
“I have never eaten there before, but after seeing this sign, I want to eat there as much as I can to support them and this amazing idea,” she told The Huffington Post.
Chhibber, who suffered from a major accident in 1992, and was bed ridden for two and a half years, ran out of money and turned to his friends for help.
“I had nine multiple fractures. Five steel rods were placed in my body to support my crushed bones.”
“One particular evening me and my wife literally had nothing to eat or any money. I was always shy to ask for help in terms of money,” he told The Huffington Post.
“So, on my crutches, me and my wife decided to visit some of our friends’ houses at around dinner time.”
According to the Huffington Post report, “the couple ended up visiting two different sets of friends, both of whom were kind to them and invited them in for supper.”
In search of a new life, he immigrated to Canada in 2005 only to go ahead and open Indian Fusion four years later.
Feeding people who were in need of it never bothered him on a financial level.
“I always say in a joke, the front door is for paying my bills and the back door is for something personal,” he told CTV.
All the images are sourced from The Huffington Post.
