Governor's tributes to Mother Teresa:

Uttarakhand Governor Margaret Alva paid rich tributes to Mother Teresa on the occasion of her birth centenary celebrations organised by the Catholic Bishops' Conference of India (CBCI) here. Speaking as the Guest of Honour at a function, Alva recollected her numerous personal interactions with the Albanian-turned-Indian nun. "I feel privileged to have known Mother Teresa for more than thirty years. Each meeting was an unforgettable encounter with a woman of God, in love with humanity. Her soft voice, her gentle touch, her warm smile, and her words of affection, touched my soul. I was blessed by her and told, I had work to do for our people," she said. Three incidents of Mother Teresa's life have moved her immensely. One is of her sisters she sent out to beg for food for the street children she harboured, the Governor said, and narrated the case of a hostile meat seller, who initially refused to give anything to the begging nuns and even insulted them but later became a daily supplier of meat to the children's kitchen after Mother Teresa's saintly intervention.

The second was her appeal to the late Jyoti Basu to give her a home to care for the thirty women languishing in a shed in Kolkata's jail. They were young students picked up during the Naxalite movement, tortured, detained and forgotten. Most of them were deranged, with lost identities. Basu obliged, and that home today cares for these women, who live in peace with love from the sisters of Mother Teresa and a smile on their faces, running the homes and learning skills, the Governor said. The third incident, Alva said, was told to her by Mother Teresa herself was regarding the opposition she faced from church priests when in the early days she converted the convent chapel into a night dormitory for shelterless street children. She stood firm and so the children after a bath and a meal spread their mats and slept securely on the chapel floor. In the morning, they said their prayers, rolled the mats, and put them along the wall for the sisters to sit on, while they prayed, Alva said. The Governor said that Mother Teresa's life of sacrifice and service was a beacon light to a world destroying itself with selfishness, greed and violence. Her message of love and forgiveness was a call to sanity for a nation torn asunder by caste divisions, communal hatred and human exploitation. And to me, she was and will always remain an inspiration and an example of a true Christian, she said.

The Governor said that awards and honours were showered on Mother Teresa but she remained a humble servant and champion of those in need.