‘Paalam’ P. Kalyansundaram is a usual human being but what he has been doing is not usual. This old man who is a retired librarian has shown to the world an entirely new perspective to look at charity; he has made charity and social service his prime priorities and agendas in his life. He has worked for the needy and poor people and particularly for the children without any failure and has been donating every single penny to them that he earns. He even has done many odd jobs just to donate the earned money to the poor ones. His life is a great example of simplicity, hard-work, humanity and no expectations. The seed of charity was sowed since his childhood, and this was seen at many stages of his life one such incident was when Kalyanasundaram was doing Library Science in Madras University and one day he listened to Jawaharlal Nehru on the radio while pleading the general public to contribute to the defence fund (for helping the needy people when the Indo-China War was on). He then went to the Chief Minister; Kamaraj and gave him his gold chain. Kalyansundaram was probably the first student in the college to have done that kind action, chief minister Kamaraj got so impressed by this benevolent act of this young boy that he felicitated him on a special function on May Day in the year 1963. P. Kalyansundaram later joined as a Librarian at the Kumarkarupa Arts College in Tuticorin where he spent 35 years of his working tenure and also continued to do social service. He never kept even a single penny with him and donated all his monthly salaries to the poor people, during that time he even donated a huge amount of Rs. 1 Lakh that he received as a salary debt to the district collector to be used for the orphan children. P.Kalyansundaram runs a social welfare organization that was named as ‘Paalam’. Paalam basically works as a mediator between the donors and the beneficiaries that helps in providing every kind of assistance to the needy children including money, free education, medical facilities, emergency help and support, organizing blood donation camps, free counselling to the unemployed, elderly people, and rehabilitation to the disabled or handicapped. He has been chosen as ‘one of the top ten librarians of the world’ beside this, the Union Government also has felicitated him as ‘the Best Librarian in India’. He has also been honoured as ‘one of the noblest of the world’ by The International Biographical Centre while the United Nations Organization honoured him as ‘one of the Outstanding People of the 20th Century’, he has also been selected as the ‘Man of the Millennium’.
