He remembered how his grandmother always chided him when he left rice uneaten on his plate that was later scrapped off by the servant and dumped in trashcan. He remembered the lavish meals he and his friends ordered in college canteen and then discarded because they cold not eat a bite more. If excess, extravagance and waste were crimes, then he was guilty of each one of them. He changed the channels once again and put on MTV. He had a huge crush on Beyonce but after witnessing the BBC report, the music seemed too loud, too cheerful and even obscene. He switched the television off. "What is wrong with me today?" He thought uneasily. "It must be the lack of food that is making me so restless." He glanced at the stately golden clock adorning the living room wall. Only twenty minutes had passed and he still had more than three and a half hours to kill. "I'll go to Bilal's house." He decided, thinking about his friend's house across the street. "Maybe a few rounds of computer games will improve my mood." When he stepped out of his house, he saw was a couple of dirty, bedraggled children foraging through the trash can. The older kid, who seemed about 5 yrs old, dragged a piece of dried chapatti out of the refuse heap and brushed away blackened mango peels from it. He broke it in two and offered the other half to his younger sister. Asad stood rooted to the spot in horror. "Hey. Don't eat that. It's terribly dirty and probably moldy too," he shouted but the duo quickly crammed the hard chapatti into their hungry mouths and scampered off. "Why had I never noticed such things before?" he wondered. Asad had never been hungry in his entire life so poverty, deprivation, and hunger were concepts that he had never thought about.If the home cooked meal was not to his liking, he always ordered his favorite foods from upscale restaurants and had them delivered home. He had a credit card, a gift from his father on his fourteenth birthday and he used it for lavish meals whenever he wished. Now hunger due to the obligatory fast was forcing him to look at the plight of the less fortunate and the more he saw, the more disturbed he felt. He crossed the street and saw a construction crew at work. Bilals' father was having a wing added to his already imposing residence. Asad paused to admire the skill of an old to be continued .....