DINH, a 42-year-old Vietnamese Buddhist monk from Australia, was here some time back to share the grief and burden of Gujarat’s earthquake victims.

Suffering motivates Dinh, since he has suffered a lot himself and knows what suffering can do to human beings. Twice he was jailed and tortured in Vietnam, before he finally escaped to Australia to carry on with his social relief work.

Exceptionally sprightly for his age, Dinh has fished out rotting bodies abandoned by families and relatives in Vietnam floods. He carried out relief work for Turkey quake victims as well. He believes in putting into practice, the compassion that Buddha preached about. There is an unusually soft heart behind his determined, business-like persona.

The unbearable stench of rotting bodies under the debris does not deter him. He is used to the smell of the dead and knows too well that life and death are a part of the same human experience. He says, "We will all be dead like them — the smell comes as we are living — one day we all will be with them." Dinh goes wherever help is needed the most; to the poorest.

"Go deep" were the mandatory words to his team of seven while distributing relief material in remote villages of Gujarat. When most of the international agencies were dumping relief material in publicised and already over-stocked cities, Dinh took care and made an effort to reach the neglected interior villages of Gujarat. He, along with his team, distributed three truckfuls of tents, blankets, buckets, clothes, medicines and food items. Squatting amidst the grief-stricken villagers, he would talk and listen to them with the help of gestures for he did not know their language.

"I am moved by the patience of Indians. They have suffered so much in this calamity, yet they have accepted it as part of their destiny and not lost hope," says Dinh.

His intense suffering has, however, not made him a cynic. Instead, it has helped him reach out to suffering humanity and lend a helping hand.

When you ask him to narrate one of his experiences, he becomes pensive, his forehead puckers with sad lines: "In Australia, I went to a Vietnamese home where the man had hanged himself because of his wife’s betrayal and infidelity. The cries of the couple’s child, a boy, were so heart-rending. The boy’s wails for his dead father made my hair stand in horror. And, sadly, the woman after her husband’s death took to prostitution."

In India, Dinh says, he has seen people suffering in silence and taking poverty as their destiny. While the poor in Vietnam try to improve, the Indians seem to rest too much on their destiny and neglect individual effort towards improvement. And the gap between the rich and the poor in India is too vast. "India is the only place in the world where you can see heaven and earth co-existing," explains Dinh, looking out of his hotel room in Ahmedabad. "Here we sit comfortably in this cozy room while we can see out of the window the shabby dwellings and the poor who may not have eaten for many days."

How would he describe his relief efforts in India? Dinh says, "We tried to do whatever we could: but I am not satisfied with the Indian authorities’ efforts towards relief work. There is no coordination in relief activities. Even the relief material provided by the international agencies and non-government organisations (NGOs) is not substantial, considering the magnitude of destruction."

Dinh would not like to compare his relief activity in India to his earlier relief works. You ask him and he replies simply: "I forget my previous works; and every time I go for the relief work it’s always the first one for me".

When Dinh is about to leave India after having done the job he came for, you ask him to describe his experience with the victims. Dinh becomes silent again, and emotional too, his eyes turning moist: "Physically and geographically, I might be away from them but my mind is still with them" he says.