In India, one of those emotional obstacles are the beggars. Typically, your first encounter with beggars in India takes place as you first touch down at an airport and you struggle to get your bearings as those sliding glass doors open the assault on the senses begins. If you are non-Indian, like me, then you are instantly targeted by the taxi drivers....and the beggars.
When a pre-teen comes to you holding an infant and asking for money it's impossible not to want to help; to make a difference. To buy that young girl a meal, or just give here the money in your wallet. The feelings of injustice rise up within you...and as you give the money a (short- lived) feeling of satisfaction flows over you. Then you notice the increasingly large crowd starting to assemble. You see the other half dozen pre-teens with infants starting to gather and any feelings of satisfaction quickly dissipate.
My wife Sangeeta is one of those people who wants to help as many people as she can. When we arrived in Delhi, she decided to give to a small group of children near our car. That group quickly became about 20....but she made sure that each and every person got something. Unfortunately, the group continued to ask for more and we had difficulty leaving the parking lot. The crowd kept coming back for more, unsatisfied with our first offering. We left the parking lot feeling annoyed rather than positive.
I have since searched for a satisfying symbol or representation to put the problem of poverty and begging in some form of tangible framework that I can more easily come to terms with. It's as if you see some small child on the beach and there some huge wave coming ashore...and you are there standing with an umbrella trying to stop it from crashing ashore. Your intentions are noble but the wave still knocks you head over heals and you are left with a a bad taste in your mouth, a bruised ego and the child was still pounded by the wave. You could argue that no one was really helped in the process.
When I am really honest with myself, I know that framing poverty in this way allows me to, if I want to, absolve myself from trying to help for what can you do in the face of a tsunami of hands reaching out...
Often, when you talk to Indians about beggars, they typically explain that the beggars are really working for a beggar master that will take all their money. "Don't give them money because they will just give it to someone else."...it's easy not to help people if you think they are part of some underworld beggar syndicate who borrow babies to extort money from sympathetic strangers.
I will end this post with a story from the other day. We were out shopping and about to spend a small Indian fortune at Cinnabon. (The irony of that last sentence is not lost on me). We were about to enter the store when Sangeeta saw a mother and her barefoot girl begging for money. The girl couldn't have been more than 2 or 3. They asked for money and I had already said no when my wife took them over to a roadside shop and bought them some milk and a loaf of bread. The mother wasn't as happy as we were to see her daughter eating the bread and chugging the bottle of milk as we went to get our Cinnabons.
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I know the poverty in India is practically beyond comprehension, but Sangeeta hit the nail on the head, as it were. I do the same here - I will take the person begging to a fast food place and buy them a meal. I often get the same reaction as the mother - they would prefer the money! But no-one has refused my offer of food.
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