When poverty turns the poor to mere statistics

Charity is justified only where there is infirmity and helplessness

One of my earliest short stories, which incidentally won a GCC contest way back in 2000 is a heart rending tale about a young hanky seller in a local train in Mumbai. Street vendors, especially little boys and girls, have always nudged me into sympathy and I have often made purchases that I really have had no need for. They evoke a distinct emotion in me that I don’t feel for a beggar, no matter how seedy looking and how desperate the entreaties. It is a confession I make at the risk of appearing insensitive towards human misery. But to me, the vendor and beggar are not the same, although what puts both of them on the open map of the streets and at the mercy of people who many times treat them with derision and gesture them be gone hurriedly. Both can be equally persistent and pull at your purse strings with like determination until you submit or scuttle off.

Poverty, by Jove, is a serious malady. It turns the unprivileged to mere statistics. The homeless to destitute. The hungry to beggars. And the wild ones to criminals. It can rob the scruples out of someone and make him a social liability. Faced with the bleakness of penury and encouraged by the ease of the task, he begs first, and steals next. Only the most resolute and the self-respecting ones take to hard toil. It is this disposition to sweat and earn that makes the street vendors more deserving of my sympathy than the infant-bearing woman at the traffic signal.

Poverty is an issue that cannot be discussed and dissected for a solution in one sitting. The variables at work are too complex for me to even briefly mention and hence, I refrain from any detailed analysis of it as a scourge that needs global attention and alleviation. Instead, I steer my thought back to the street where it festers and shows up in its most innocuous form of beggary.

There was a time when I used to be terrified by the eunuchs of Mumbai and had often spared money to get them out of sight. With my limited understanding of their social condition aided by my own misplaced notions about them at a young, impressionable age, I had privately legitimized their begging act. But now, I remain unaffected by their rants, yet cannot come to terms with the fact that able bodied persons still manipulate people’s psyche to make a living. When a friend recently suggested that it was the only means of livelihood they had and therefore they could be excused for the act, I wondered if it wasn’t our own prejudices against the third gender that rendered them so wasted to the society and justified their existence as the palm-slapping, alms seekers. Unless we adopt an outlook that accepts them to be included into the mainstream, beggary will remain their main justified source of income, and that I take exception to, because beggary is effortless, and when it thrives, the tendency to strive declines.

It is not easy to overlook the moral questions that ignoring a person in need elicit. Can we turn a blind eye to the sufferings of another man? No. Shouldn’t we employ our largesse to relieve it? Yes, but charity is justified only where there is infirmity and helplessness, not where it will breed further lethargy and degeneration. Beggary does that. It encourages indolence and makes labour look lame. Why would anyone slog if money is doled out into the hand? Socio-economic challenges will always be used to vindicate poverty related issues, and beggary, as much as it is abhorred, will continue to thrive as long as we deal with it philanthropically than pragmatically.

I was recently accosted by a man selling a toy for which I had no use whatsoever. Turned away by most of those he approached, he came to me and what he said next made me dig into my bag for money. “I will have my breakfast if you will buy this.”

The man was apparently famished and he wasn’t clearly begging for food or money. He was merely making an ardent sales pitch for a thing that most will consider trash. It didn’t matter what I would do with it, what mattered was I was helping him have his day’s meal. It wasn’t charity, nor was it generosity, it was respect for a man who chose to work to earn his breakfast than beg for it.

Among the scores of unnecessary things I splurg on, there are some that I truly spend on. Whoever said that hunger wasn’t an issue of charity but one of justice, probably meant this sense of fairness and reasoning that we could exercise in matters of dispensing money.

Asha Iyer Kumar is a writer based in Dubai

It is not easy to overlook the moral questions that ignoring a person in need elicit. Can we turn a blind eye to the sufferings of another man?