 |
| The man with the golden heart has been identified as the Dubai-based engineer Akhilesh Kumar |
January 21, 2016, NewsCrunch
The heart-warming viral story from Kerala that took over the Internet on Thursday is only partly true and comes with a disappointing twist.
The man with the golden heart has been identified as the Dubai-based engineer Akhilesh Kumar; the hotel which hosted the incident is Hotel Sabrina on Pattambhi Road, Mallapuram.
When NewsCrunch took note of the story in the afternoon, key details were missing and we stated that we could not ascertain if it was true.
To recap, Akhilesh Kumar had gone to Hotel Sabrina for dinner. He saw two rag-picker children, a brother and sister, looking through the glass window from outside.
He invited them in and bought them food, which they ate and left quietly. When he asked for the bill, it came but without any amount mentioned. It just carried a hand-written message in Malayalam:
"We don't have a machine that can bill humanity. May good happen to you."
Akhilesh Kumar's generosity and the cashier's poetic large-hearted response made people cry and the story went viral.
 |
| The incident occurred at Hotel Sabrina on Pattambhi Road, Mallapuram. Pic courtesy - Southlive.in |
1) The incident, according to Akhilesh Kumar, occurred in 2013. He wrote about it on his Facebook page only this month.
2) After the story went viral, reporters went to Hotel Sabrina to trace the cashier who had written the stunning message. But he could not be found. The hotel owner and none of the other staff could not remember the incident.
3) Akhilesh Kumar told media that he did not get any bill from the cashier, who seems to have just waived it off. So, who wrote the message on the bill, the image of which has gone viral. Akhilesh Kumar himself. He says he downloaded the bill from the Net and wrote the line.
But he vouches that the incident is for real. He says in 2013 he used to live in a nearby place and would go to the restaurant to eat. He was eating parota and chicken one day when he saw two kids staring. He called them in and bought them food.
4) To be fair to Akhilesh Kumar, he seems to have written the incident as a story and not as a recollection of an actual incident. He also had not reportedly revealed details of the hotel or about himself in the post.
But then he was not counting on nosy reporters to snoop on his Facebook page and start the hunt.