Making Friends out of Strangers

Making Friends out of Strangers Develop genuine love for others in your heart and then others cannot but love you in return. P eople, normally preoccupied with their family members and a small circle of friends, do not generally want to become familiar with strangers; they take strangers to be ‘others’. This kind of thinking is based simply on suppositions about others – and sometimes such suppositions are unfounded. Experience shows that it is perfectly possible to make friends out of strangers. Swami Rama Tirath (1873 – 1906) a man of considerable education, decided in the last decade of the nineteenth century to visit the USA, in spite of not having enough money to finance his stay there and in spite of there being no Indians to receive him on American soil. After a long sea voyage, he reached the American coast, where he disembarked along with the other passengers. There were many Americans who had come to receive their friends and relatives at the port, but Swami Ram Tirath eventually found himself walking all alone in a corner of the port. An American,