Touching Story

I was walking around in a Departmental store making shopping, when I saw a Cashier talking to a boy couldn't have been more than 5 or 6 years old..




The Cashier said, 'I'm sorry, but you don't have enough money to buy

this doll. Then the little boy turned to me and asked: ''aunty, are you sure I don't have enough money?''



I counted his cash and replied: ''You know that you don't have enough money to buythe dolll, my dear.'' The little boy was still holding the doll in his hand.



Finally, I walked toward him and I asked him who he wished to give this

doll to. 'It's the doll that my sister loved most and wanted so much . Iwanted to Gift her for her BIRTHDAY.



I have to give the doll to my mommy so that she can give it

to my sister when she goes there.' His eyes were so sad while saying this. 'My Sister has gone to be with God.. Daddy says that Mommy is going to see God very soon too, so I thought that she could take the doll with her to give it to my sister..''



My heart nearly stopped. The little boy looked up at me and said: 'I told daddy to tell mommy not to go yet. I need her to wait until I come back from the mall.' Then he showed me a very nice photo of him where he was laughing. He then told me 'I want mommy to take my picture with her so my sister won't forget me.' 'I love my mommy and I wish she doesn't have to leave me, but daddy says that she has to go to be with my little sister.' Then he looked again at the doll with sad eyes, very quietly.



I quickly reached for my wallet and said to the boy. 'Suppose we check

again, just in case you do have enough money for the doll?''

'OK' he said, 'I hope I do have enough.' I added some of my money to his with out him seeing and we started to count it. There was enough for the doll and even some spare money.



The little boy said: 'Thank you God for giving me enough money!'

Then he looked at me and added, 'I asked last night before I went to

sleep for God to make sure I had enough money to buy this doll, so that

mommy could give It to my sister. He heard me!'' 'I also wanted to have enough money to buy a white rose for my mommy,

but I didn't dare to ask God for too much. But He gave me enough to buy the doll and a white rose. My mommy loves white roses.'



I finished my shopping in a totally different state from when I started. I

couldn't get the little boy out of my mind. Then I remembered a local

news paper article two days ago, which mentioned a drunk man in a truck, who hit a car occupied by a young woman and a little girl. The little girl died right away, and the mother was left in a critical state. The

family had to decide whether to pull the plug on the life-sustaining

machine, because the young woman would not be able to recover from the coma. Was this the family of the little boy?



Two days after this encounter with the little boy, I read in the news

paper that the young woman had passed away.. I couldn't stop myself as I bought a bunch of white roses and I went to the funeral home where the body of the young woman was exposed for people to see and make last wishes before her burial. She was there, in her coffin, holding a

beautiful white rose in her hand with the photo of the little boy and

the doll placed over her chest. I left the place, teary-eyed, feeling

that my life had been changed for ever.



The love that the little boy had for his mother and his sister is still,

to this day, hard to imagine. And in a fraction of a second, a drunk

driver had taken all this away from him.


The value of a man or woman resides in what he or she gives, not in what they are capable of receiving.

Indian Gods Specialisation

Brahma

Systems Installation

Vishnu

Systems Administration & Support

Lakshmi

Finance and Accounts consultant

Saraswati

Training and Knowledge Management

Shiva

DBA (Crash Specialist)

Ganesh

Quality Assuarance & Documentation

Narada

Data transfer

Yama

Reorganization & Downsizing Consultant

Chitragupta

IDP & Personal Records

Apsaras

Downloadable Viruses

Devas

Mainframe Programmers

Surya

Solaris Administrator

Rakshasas

In house Hackers

Ravan

! ;Internet Explorer WWWF

Lakshman

Support Software and Backup

Hanuman

Linux/s390

Jatayu

Firewall

Dronacharya

System Programmer

Vishwamitra

Sr. Manager Projects

Valmiki

Technical Writer (Ramayana Sign off document)

Krishna

SDLC ( Sudarshan Wheel Development Life Cycle )

Arjun

Lead Programmer (all companies are vying for him)

Abhimanyu

Trainee Programmer

Draupadi

Motivation & Team building

Bhima

MAINFRAME LEGACY SYSTEM

Duryodhana

Microsoft product Written in VB

Karna

Contract programmer

Dhrutarashtra

Visual C++

Gandhari

Dreamweaver

100 Kauravas

Microsoft Service Packs and patches

Sherlock Holmes-Hound of Baskervilles- Analysis

Fiction's most famous detective had fallen to his death at the Reichenbach Falls – killed off by his creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, who wanted to concentrate on more serious works. The reading public had been devastated: there were reports of clerks going to work wearing black mourning bands, and Conan Doyle himself received countless letters of complaint, while shareholders in The Strand – in which Holmes's adventures usually appeared – watched their stock nervously.
So when, in 1901, it was announced that the great detective was to return, the reaction was wildly ebullient. The Hound was not a resurrection as such: the adventure was said to predate Holmes's death. But public enthusiasm was no less fervent for that. So keen were readers to get on with the tale that few seem to have noticed anunusual footnote on the front page. "This story," it read, "owes its inception to my friend Mr Fletcher Robinson, who has helped me both with the general plot and in the local details. ACD."
Yet today, with the exception of aficionados, no one remembers Bertram Fletcher Robinson. Indeed, the novel is always printed with just one name on the cover and spine: that of Arthur Conan Doyle. That is how it appears in the new Penguin Classics edition, whose publication is celebrated with a party at the Murder One bookshop in London tonight. So what happened to Fletcher Robinson?
As the celebrations of the book's centenary gather pace (other highlights include expeditions and enactments on Dartmoor, numerous new books on Conan Doyle, even a spoof version by Spike Milligan), a dark suspicion overshadows them: that its creation involved literary foul play.
Initially, Conan Doyle had wanted a joint billing for Fletcher Robinson, as he made clear in a letter to The Strand prior to publication: "[I have] one stipulation. I must do it with Fletcher Robinson, and his name must appear with mine: he gave me the central idea and the colour, and so I feel his name must appear." Why, then, was Fletcher Robinson not credited as co-author? To solve this mystery, we have to examine the evidence of the book's inception, more than a century ago.
In March 1901, Conan Doyle and Fletcher Robinson, a young journalist with the Daily Express, had taken a golfing holiday to Cromer, on the Norfolk coast. They had not been there many days when their golf was interrupted by a storm from the North Sea. The two men retired to the sitting room of the Royal Links Hotel and began to talk. Perhaps stirred on by the gloomy atmosphere outside, their conversation eventually turned to the myths of Norfolk; and Fletcher Robinson told Conan Doyle about a phantom dog – called Black Shuck – said to haunt the local countryside. Black Shuck was a terrifying creature: as big as a calf, and with eyes that bled fire. Anyone unfortunate enough to meet this apparition was sure to die.
Conan Doyle, whose lifelong aversion to dogs was matched by his growing interest in the spiritual world, was inspired by this legend. As night fell, the two men began plotting a novel together on the subject.
If there were any doubts about this being a collaborative affair, they were dispelled by Conan Doyle himself, who in a letter to his mother wrote: "Fletcher Robinson came here [Cromer] with me and we are going to do a small book together. A real creeper!" That "real creeper" was to become The Hound of the Baskervilles.
Having established a subject and a plot, the book-to-be now needed a location. At Robinson's invitation, Conan Doyle travelled to his home in the West of England, on the edge of Dartmoor. With its primordial landscape, rocky tors and creeping mists, the moor seemed the perfect setting.
To guide them around it the pair called on the services of one Harry Baskerville, Robinson's coachman. The actual origin of the name Baskerville is one of literature's greatest mysteries. Harry Baskerville always claimed he was the eponymous inspiration; indeed, his most prized possession was a first edition of the novel, signed by Fletcher Robinson with the inscription "With apologies for using the name". Not your name, one can hear Sherlock Holmes pointing out: the name. Poor Harry's claim is further blighted by the fact that Conan Doyle had already written half the book before venturing to Dartmoor and meeting the coachman.
Sir Christopher Frayling, rector of the Royal College of Art and an expert on crime fiction (who edited the Penguin Classics edition of The Hound), believes there are several other candidates for the real Baskervilles. "One of the most likely are the Baskervilles of Clyro Court on the border between England and Wales," he says. "For generations these Baskervilles had been intermarrying with their neighbours, the Vaughans. And here the plot most definitely thickens – because the Vaughans had a family legend about a huge, black dog."
Two other pieces of evidence support the Vaughan-Baskerville theory. First, Herbert Greenhough Smith, editor of The Strand, always contended that "Conan Doyle was introduced to the tradition of the fiery hound in a Welsh guide book". More compellingly, the novelist himself had been a guest at Clyro Court in 1897.
All this does little to help Fletcher Robinson's case as co-author of The Hound. If the canine of the novel is indeed the hound of the Vaughan-Baskervilles, and not Black Shuck of Norfolk, then perhaps Conan Doyle's assertion that Fletcher Robinson had given him "the central idea" was merely a gesture of friendship.
The Fletcher Robinson family home – Park Hill House – was on the edge of the moor in a small village called Ipplepen, and it was from here that the two friends began a research trip. Back then, the house would have stood alone in the rolling Devonshire farmland. Today it is situated almost on top of the A381, opposite a petrol station. The building itself, long since sold by the Fletcher Robinsons, is now divided up into six flats, with a new roof and freshly painted white walls. There is nothing to indicate its association with one of literature's greatest detective novels.
Some 15 miles to the west of Ipplepen, through a maze of narrow lanes, lies Princetown. It was here that, having spent eight days at Park Hill House, Conan Doyle and Fletcher Robinson continued their research trip, taking up residence in Princetown's Rowe Duchy Hotel. The hotel has long since closed, but the building is still there and today houses a tourist centre and exhibition about the history of Dartmoor. Watching over this is a life-size model of Sherlock Holmes and behind him a cardboard cut-out of the building's most famous guest, Conan Doyle. There is no sign of Fletcher Robinson.
From Princetown, the two continued their explorations of the moor, taking in locations such as the Neolithic circle at Grimspound, which Fletcher Robinson described as "one of the loneliest spots in Great Britain", and Fox Tor Mire, setting of the climactic scenes of The Hound.
On a bright summer's day, blue skies and warm sunshine stand in marked contrast to the book's sinister descriptions, let alone the gloomy, fog-bound images of countless movie adaptations. Nevertheless, even with the sun shining, Dartmoor has a desolate quality, even if today the only horror is foot-and-mouth.
It was in Princetown that much of the book was written. Only one chapter of the original manuscript – Chapter 7 – survives. It is entirely in Conan Doyle's hand.
In an interview shortly before his death in 1960, the coachman Harry Baskerville claimed to have seen Fletcher Robinson write whole chunks of the novel. However, according to Heather Owen of the Sherlock Holmes Society: "There's no evidence to corroborate Harry Baskerville's story. Besides, it's unrealistic to expect a coachman to go lurking around his master's study. The truth is, there's no way he could have ever known."
The initial excitement of August 1901 continued throughout the entire serialisation of The Hound of the Baskervilles. During this time The Strand's circulation increased by a staggering 120,000 copies. The final instalment was published in April 1902.
Meanwhile, the story developed a momentum of its own. At its conception, The Hound had not featured Sherlock Holmes. But, as the story developed, so too did the need for a larger-than-life character to solve the mystery. As Conan Doyle put it: "Why should I invent such a character when I already had one in the form of Sherlock Holmes?"
Fletcher Robinson's literary fate was sealed. With Holmes now in charge, Conan Doyle took over the writing completely, reneging on his earlier stipulation that the book be published under both names. Still, for every £100 that Conan Doyle received per 1,000 words, Fletcher Robinson got £30; that, and the footnote crediting his contribution.
In later editions, however, Conan Doyle's acknowledgement of collaboration became a passing thank you for "suggesting the idea"; later still, Fletcher Robinson's involvement was reduced to a mere "chance remark" that had inspired Sherlock Holmes's creator to pick up his pen once more. Just to make sure there would be no misunderstandings on the point, Conan Doyle added: "I can vouch that the plot and every word of the actual narrative were my own."
Despite this, Frayling does not feel Fletcher Robinson was cheated. "I don't believe that he actually wrote a single word of the book. He suggested the hound, as Conan Doyle was the first to admit. But that was all. The truth is that Fletcher Robinson was a third-rate writer."
Not everyone agrees with this assessment. One theory has it that Fletcher Robinson's untimely death – in 1907, at the age of 36, allegedly from typhoid – was in fact caused deliberately by Conan Doyle, a qualified doctor, who poisoned him with laudanum, which has similar symptoms. But the author of this eccentric hypothesis, a writer called Rodger Garrick-Steele, has yet to publish the book in which he expounds it.
Heather Owen, meanwhile, remains convinced that the creation of The Hound was entirely above board. "I don't feel that Fletcher Robinson's involvement has been underestimated. He received both thanks and royalties, which were all that were required in the circumstances."
Yet that is not quite the end of the story. Just three months before that holiday in Cromer, a story by Mrs LT Meade had appeared in The Strand. Entitled "Followed", it was about a huge, black Tasmanian snake, thought to be supernatural but not. The finale of the story sees the serpent chasing a girl across Salisbury Plain, before it is finally shot. Conan Doyle may well have read this story, which may well have fired his imagination.
It's an appropriately unexpected twist to the tangled tale of The Hound. But it is not as satisfying as Conan Doyle's fiction, in which all loose ends were generally tied up. All that we can be certain of is that, in future, the book will continue to be hounded by controversy.