This is a story that spans 25 years, but ask Suresh Chandra about it, and he'll tell you a tale that covered just 24 hours.

It was in India, maybe a dozen years ago, and Chandra was watching a blind man eat his lunch, a snack really, a little bit of puffed rice.

Later that day, the man had cataract surgery that restored his eyesight, and at lunch the next day, when the man saw Chandra, he cut his puffed rice in half.

"This is all I can do," the man said, offering half the rice.

"He shared his lunch with me," Chandra was recalling this week. "That really touched me."

Wednesday night, at the Marriott Madison West, the Combat Blindness Foundation (CBF) - founded in 1984 by Chandra, an ophthalmologist at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health - will celebrate its 25th anniversary.

For a quarter century now, Chandra, originally from India, has been leading trips to the developing world with the goal of eradicating preventable blindness.

The results have been stunningly tangible. Five years in, nearly 6,500 free cataract surgeries had been performed. Today that number is 130,000.

But numbers can't give you goose bumps. That only comes from hearing from people like Madison attorney Rick Langer, who serves on the board of CBF and who, with his wife, Audrey, has made three trips to India with Chandra.

The Langers last went to India just last year, and this week Rick recalled speaking, through an interpreter, with an elderly man who was sitting on an examining table, awaiting surgery.

The man had been led to the medical camp by his oldest grandchild. They had walked from their village, each holding the end of a walking stick. The man had been without sight for five years.

"What do you most want to see again?" Rick asked.

"Again" proved to be the wrong word. "I want to see my youngest grandchild," the man said. "For the first time."

Later, after his successful surgery, he handed the walking stick to Audrey.

Ask Rick Langer about Chandra - who returned from his latest trip to India just last week - and he'll tell you he's never met a greater humanitarian or anyone with a bigger heart.

Chandra first came to Madison in 1974, having completed a Retina Fellowship at Harvard Medical School in Boston. A decade later, settled in at UW-Madison as a specialist in diseases of the retina, he decided it was time to give back.

Chandra originally figured he would go to his native India - where he knew people, and his way around - and do retina work. But retina surgeries take hours. Chandra quickly determined that many more people could be helped by concentrating on cataracts, which account for roughly half the blindness in the world. In addition, he would tackle xerophthalmia, an eye disease affecting children caused by a deficiency of vitamin A.

Chandra founded CBF in 1984, and he has averaged one or two trips a year of several weeks duration ever since. He's recruited volunteers, many from Madison, to accompany him, including Gordon Derzon, the former longtime CEO of UW Hospital and Clinics. Derzon is vice chair of CBF.

Nobody who takes a trip with Chandra ever forgets it. Langer recalled the scene at one screening camp in India as akin to "a football Saturday at Camp Randall," with Chandra acting almost as a triage doctor, checking patients and directing them to the right place. In the old days, Chandra did some surgeries himself, but now his role is more of facilitator and coordinator.

He is, he said this week, moving further away from his active retina practice at UW and more into his work with CBF. There is nothing more rewarding, he said.

"Twenty-five years ago," Chandra said, "I didn't have any idea what would happen other than that we wanted to start the foundation."

Wednesday night will be a celebration of all that has happened. "I'm pretty happy with what we've done," he said.

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