Yesterday I wrote about how in my opinion Good Karma has helped me in far off places like South Korea.

This time I will narrate one of the many situations which I encountered in Paris.

My family and I were visiting Paris in 2018. In Paris the best way to travel around town is using the Metro. However one of the challenges of using the metro you need to understand the inter-change because all of them are marked in French. I had been to Paris multiple times earlier when I was a very small kid along with my parents and elder brother. Since then I had the intention to take my family to Paris since I find it very beautiful.

We were staying at a relative’s house which was in a suburb of Paris.

On this day, when this incident took place, we had taken the cruise on the river Seine and after a late evening walk to Trocedero to have a look at the Eiffel Tower we were totally exhausted.

So we walked over to the metro station and identified the station where we had to do the interchange to take the metro to our stop. Once we reached the station where we had to do changeover to the other line of the metro we could not find the exit from which we would get into the station for our metro line.

It was quite late in the night, we were exhausted and there were no one to help us identify the location and we kept going round in circles. Even though Paris is relatively safe for tourists, when you are with your family in an unknown place and its kind of late in the night, you tend to get a little anxious.

The other challenge is that Google Maps at that time would get confused in identifying French locations because we were using the English interface.

While the three of us were moving around, un-noticed to us, on the station there was a person who was cleaning the platform. He saw us walking around 4-5 times around the same point with map in hand.

He came to us on his own. He didn’t know English. We didn’t know French. But he sensed our anxiety and worry.

In his own sign language the person asked our issue. We showed him the location we had to go to and metro line we had to take. He simply asked us to follow him in his sign language.

Leaving his broom in a closet, he led us through a flight of stairs and then about 5-7 minutes of walking to the point where the escalators to the other platform were located. That’s when we heaved a sigh of relief.

This gentleman pointed to the escalator. We thanked him profusely and tried to tell him in English how grateful we were, but he only understood the “Merci” , waved as if he had done nothing spectacular and walked back to go to his location to clean up the platform.

People do try to help a lot in Paris especially when they realise you are coming from India to see their country and don’t know their language.

Like I have said earlier, inspite of all the negativities the politicians and the news may make you believe the world is a pretty decent place and you will find good people in all places.

Till next time -stay positive stay enerrgised.

Carpe Diem!!!