Ever since my first forays on the information superhighway, I have been indoctrinated with the culture of cynicism and skepticism especially when dealing with 'forwards'. After years of receiving emails with subject lines like "forward this to ten other people", "Prince XYZ wants to give me a million dollars", "Service XYZ is deleting account" etc., I have begun tossing such emails into Trash/spam without even having to think about it.
Naturally when I received an email with a subject-line "Fwd: An appeal", I tossed it straight to Trash after just a cursory look. However it turns out that this time the appeal is probably genuine, since I could trace a chain of people to the family in question (pretty much the same way digital signatures are generally verified).
The appeal is for a seven year old boy in Mumbai named Piyush diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblast Leukemia. His family needs to raise a total of about USD $350K for his treatment (last checked, they had raised about USD $160K). The details for donating money can be found at www.aidmyson.com and Piyush.
One of the aims of this post is to send a word out for Piyush (assuming someone reads this post on a blog with near zero traffic). However it is also a reminder to me that though my skepticism protects me from falling prey to all the scams out there, sometimes genuine issues can be lost in the midst of cynicism.
1 comment:
You are right...sometimes genuine issues are lost in the midst of cynicism. I will put this up on my blog, even though I cannot make a financial contribution myself.
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