Undiscovered country. How do we know how to do good?

A few days ago, after a meeting with colleagues, I was riding home on my motorcycle. As I took a U-turn, I saw a man standing by the roadside. That he was blind was obvious. A thin person with a stick in his hand, and wearing a shirt that, although ironed and tucked in, was old. It had a small tear as well.

I asked him if he would like a drop. He said no, and that he was looking to get some money for lunch. It was stated in a matter-of-fact manner, a man without the means to feed himself. I gave him a hundred-rupee note.

As I drove on, I vaguely recalled seeing him before. It was a while ago, maybe a few weeks ago, maybe a couple of months.

He had been standing somewhere nearby, I’d ferried him to some other place close by. On the ride he had told me about himself, his wife — also blind — and their difficulties. I had given him some money then as well.

It is an odd situation to be in, to be able to give money to people who may need it. For most of my life I have not had that much, either in debt or running just a little ahead of my needs with my salary, and then suddenly I had more than I needed.

I guess one can always spend money on things, but I have never really cared for much beyond eating well with friends, and some travel. My passions — for books and music, and maybe a toy here or there — are inexpensive, easily satisfied. And the rest weighs on me.

The suits that I wear only a few times a year, the boots that I wear more often than that, all of it seem like a weight that I can never quite shrug off.

Maybe this weight is at its heaviest when I see people like this blind man and having to decide what to do. We always have little information, and how is a person who has more than he needs, to judge the needs of those who have less than enough to meet theirs? A gift of money seems almost like a cop-out, and excuse to not really do anything, more self-indulgence than generosity.

Many of us expect the government to take care of matters, to provide basic services, to look after those that cannot look after themselves. That is why we pay taxes, right? That’s why that set of lines at the bottom of every little receipt — from the grocery store to the restaurant — tells us that we are paying to keep the country going. And yet, is that enough? We know it is not. We look out the window, we walk down the street, we just open our eyes, and we know it is not enough.

The problem is that we just don’t know how to help. Sometimes people approach us for help. In my colony a guard asked for money for a daughter’s wedding. We all deal with such requests, and do what we can, but it does not change the things that matter — the structure of our lives, the traps within which the poor and marginalised find themselves.

This requires not just kindness, or cold charity, but a network of people working together to change society, to improve the country we live in.

We turn to civil society for this, to NGOs, to networks we know. But again, that really isn’t good enough, is it? How are we to know that the NGOs will not just replicate the failures of the government, empower the privileged amongst us to greater, structured privilege, use the money that we have put aside to help the marginalised? One of the greatest failures in Indian society is the lack of knowledge on what social groups do in the name of doing good. How do you know whether a small NGO in a town you may never have heard of is doing better work than the big NGO advertising in the papers? How do we measure good, how do we compare?

The fact that we have not invested in creating such a repository is the reason behind the number of people living on the streets, and also why we fob off our conscience with cold charity given to our fellow citizens who deserve better.

Omair Ahmad

Omair T Ahmad is the South Asia Editor for The Third Pole, reporting on water issues in the Himalayas; Twitter: @OmairTAhmad

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