By Carmen Anderson
Father and son duo, Rasiklal and Vipul Surti, owners of Raj’s Curry House in Queensway Quay Marina, have teamed together to send life-saving oxygen to a hospital in Mira-Bhayandar, India.
Rasiklal and Vipul are both originally from Bhayandar and have remained in contact with family and friends back home. When they discovered that Bhayandar’s community was struggling to deal with the scale of COVID infections and required help, they immediately rose to the occasion and were more than happy to provide whatever help they could. Of utmost urgency was that Bhayandar was suffering from a desperate shortage of oxygen for saving the lives of COVID patients. Vipul promptly contacted a local charity and set about organising the funding of oxygen supplies.
This is not the first time that Rasiklal and Vipul have helped Bhayandar – they have been helping to support the community there for many years, primarily by providing food and groceries, and also through financial help to support education for Bhayandar’s children. The Gibraltar-based father and son team continue with the provision of food to COVID patients in isolation who are not able to cook for themselves.
Bhayandar was suffering from a desperate shortage of oxygen for saving lives.
In the future, Rasiklal and Vipul are planning to open a kitchen in India to provide free food to anyone who needs it; “We were supposed to open the kitchen this year but have not been able to go due to COVID,” Rasiklal explained. “Everything is ready to go, and as soon as restrictions are lifted and we are allowed, we will, but for the time being we will continue to provide food supplies,” Vipul added. The Surtis have their own family foundation called the ‘Ruthfull Foundation’ under which umbrella all their charitable work is carried out.
Rasiklal explained that he feels powerfully motivated to do as much as he can for those who are in need because he himself came from a poor family; “I know what being poor feels like. I wanted to go to school and educate myself, but I did not have the funds for it – this is why I would love to provide education to people in India. I believe that if I do good things for people and my family, that will come back around to me.”
“We are focusing on our kitchen right now, but we would also like to focus on education. There are many students in India who are poor, but so talented. We would like to open an education centre there in the future,” Vipul explained. “We have big, big plans,” Rasiklal added “we would like to also extend this to providing medicine in the future.”
“Food is our main focus because you need food, it is the most important thing in our lives. If you are getting free food, you can survive. Being in the catering industry, it just made sense to us,” Vipul said.
Rasiklal and Vipul are now setting up a charity in Gibraltar so they can continue raising funds for India and hope to open up this charity in the next few months.
