It was twilight when I got out of the car with Maya in the parking lot of a local grocery store. There was a woman standing in the shadows, slowly rocking side to side on her feet. I couldn’t see her face clearly but I knew instantly who she was.

Encounters Around The World

An evening many years ago, I was walking towards my motorcycle at the city bus terminal. I was in India, fresh out of college and on my first job. A fairly well dressed, clean shaven man, stopped me and asked me for help. He said that he had been on his way to buy medicine for his sick mom and that his wallet had been robbed by a pickpockteer. He promised to meet me the next day at the same time, at the same place with the money. What he was asking for, Rs.50, was not a fortune. As the money exchanged hands, I remember telling him, “If you’re not here tomorrow with the money, you’ll sour my trust in humanity”. The man winced and said, “Please don’t say that. I’ll be here”.

When I got home, I told my father what had happened and he laughed at my naivete. “For your sake, I hope I’m wrong and the man is there tomorrow”. Needless to say, this story ended the way countless others have. A fool and his money were soon parted. I waited for a long time the next day at the city bus terminal, but the man didn’t show up.

I was miffed. I like to think that I’m smart and don’t like being made a fool of. How could I have been so easily fooled. The man’s story was not uncredible. The city buses plied through that same terminal and was a major transit point to catch connecting buses. The parking lot was adjacent to the main walkway that connected the main railway terminal with the market. Pickpocketeers were (and still are) common. He was dressed well enough for me to not mistake him for a beggar. But, medicine stores are dime a dozen in India; were, even in those days. Did he have to be taking a bus to get medicine ? Did he have to go to the market in search of one ? But, he  could’ve been looking for a specific medicine that was not in stock at the stores away from the market. How could I have avoided being fooled ?

Since ancient times, in India at least, run of the mill mendicants and great souls like Mahavira and Buddha resorted to alms for food. Beggars position themselves outside temples, their bodies deformed by some disease or another, pleading in that voice for some money, that god would bless our children and family and look after us. Moved in part by pity (the root of the word alms is a Latin word meaning pity), in part by gratitude of what we’ve been spared, and in part by culture, we toss them a few coins. Beggars are a constant in the seething mass of humanity that is India. They surround us so much, we grow inured to them. They’re so many, what else can we do but learn to ignore them, as unmoved by their beseeching as the daily statistic of dead in war or natural calamity. We simply turn the page, scanning for something else to catch our eye.

When I lived in France, my perception of beggars changed. In India, you know who the beggars are. One day, in the subway in Paris, a man entered a car and spoke some words. I didn’t know the language, but I didn’t detect anything resembling the tone of a beggar. He didn’t look shabbily dressed and he wasn’t deformed. After his little speech, he took off his cap and walked around holding his cap. Wow! I remember saying to myself, in the West even beggars dress well.

When we moved to the US, beggars were as easily discernible as their counterparts in India. But they weren’t without surprise. As part of the community outreach program at a friend’s company, many years ago a few of us cooked a meal and took it to a church to feed the homeless. The practice at the church was that we ate with them. We scattered amongst the different tables to mix with the people we were feeding. As I sat down at my table, one of the guys asked me if I had read J. Krishnamurti. At the table next to mine, my friend was being interrogated about the price of laptops and the processing speed of the latest Intel processors. This was another revelation. In India, the beggars are really wretched (notwithstanding the guy at the start of this story). You don’t expect them to be even mildly knowledgeable about the world, let alone discuss Intel processors or Krishnamurti.

A few years back, Shanthala and I visited Lisbon, Portugal. One of the searing images of the city for me was the sight of a beggar in the main town plaza, with a little dog holding a little bucket into which you could drop some coins. I felt for the dog a lot more than I felt for the boy. I wondered how much its poor jaw hurt. I was upset at what I felt and wondered why I felt that way. Looking for the picture on flickr, I found that this had left a mark on many other people too. There were many pictures of this pair, one of which is shown below (thanks to tsparks @ flickr).

Around the world, I’ve seen homeless and destitute with animals by their side.

So What Do We Do ?

As is my wont, I discussed beggars and our response to them with friends and colleagues. Some considered beggars to be lazy people, begging instead of working. My father was one of the people who subscribed to this view. Some informed me of the underworld of beggars, of criminals who ran beggar rings (the movie, Slumdog Millionaire, has a gut-wrenching scene about this). Others informed me about how capitalism worked and how there would always be beggars because of the nature of the system. When I came to the US, I learnt than beggars had another word, homeless. That they were mentally ill, substance abusers whose vices made them  homeless. Instead of giving them money, offer to buy them food, I was told.

As a consequence of all this, my reaction to beggars grew ambivalent. In India, I just stopped giving money to beggars. In the US, I usually offer to buy them food and if they refuse, I walk away. But one thing never changed. I almost never could look them in the eye. I also feel a pang of something. I think it maybe guilt, like a survivor’s guilt, unsure of why exactly I was in the position I was and the beggar in his or hers. And if I encounter one after having had a good dinner, I inevitably feel bad. I had just tossed as much money on a single meal as might sustain somebody for at least a few days in the US or for a month or more in India.

The only response that seemed somewhat principled, that didn’t result in either castigation and guilt or cultivated ignorance, that didn’t waste time wondering if our efforts weren’t just futile in the face of so many, was what Shanthala’s dad did. He carried loose change in his pocket, change that he accumulated via the transactions conducted during the day. When anyone approached him for alms, he handed over some of that change. When the change was over, he was done giving alms. Another thing that he did was to always purchase whatever it was that a child was selling. The child is trying to work instead of begging and so I’ll support that was his motto.

Poverty in the US

A week or so ago, the census bureau released the latest statistics on the poverty in this country. 46.2 million Americans, or one in six Americans, are now poor as per the census bureau, the largest number of Americans in this dire straits since the census bureau started tracking this data. Lawrence Katz, an economics professor at Harvard University is quoted in the NYT as saying:
“This is truly a lost decade. We think of America as a place where every generation is doing better, but we’re looking at a period when the median family is in worse shape than it was in the late 1990s.”

The income of the people in the top 10% of the nation’s income earners fell by just 1.2% compared to a drop of 15% for the people at the other end of the spectrum, the lowest 10% of income earnings. The NYT quotes economists as saying that joblessness is what is pushing more people into poverty and the longer people are out of a job, the harder it is to get a job and work their way back to where they were.

A story on Yahoo News! about this latest report has this to start with:
“At a food pantry in a Chicago suburb, a 38-year-old mother of two breaks into tears.

She and her husband have been out of work for nearly two years. Their house and car are gone. So is their foothold in the middle class and, at times, their self-esteem.

“It’s like there is no way out,” says Kris Fallon.

She recounted how she and her husband — once earning nearly $100,000 a year between the two of them— lost their jobs, forcing them to move from their rented home into an apartment and give up their car.

“I never understood why there were so many food pantries and why people couldn’t just get on their feet and get going, but now that I’m in it, I fully understand,” she said. “I sometimes feel like I am a loser … I have never been unemployed and I never thought I would be going through this, ever.”

Here is another passage from the same report, about a town called Pembroke in Illinois state:
“The staples that make up the town square are gone: No post office, no supermarket, no pharmacy, no barber shop or gas station. School doors are shuttered. The police officers were all laid off, a meat processing plant closed. In many places, light switches don’t work, and water faucets run dry. Residents let their garbage smolder on their lawn because there’s no truck to take it away; many homes are burned out”

This is a picture from America!

The Woman In The Shadows

I recognized the woman standing in the shadows as a beggar. She had what seemed like a baby in her arms, covered with a cloth. She rocked the baby back and forth. I wanted to pick up the cart from the other end, but Maya dashed off to the one by the lady and I was forced to face her. She smiled wanly and asked me for some money. I gave her my stock answer, that I’d buy her and the baby whatever food they needed, but I wouldn’t give her any money. She winced and with her wan smile said that she needed money to pay for rent and that she already had food. She thanked me for my kindness and I walked away into the store. The contrast between the life that Maya might have if all continued to be well with us and the baby in that woman’s arms made me want to cry.

I remember a blog entry from the blogs at Wired magazine that spoke of the effects of poverty on the cognitive development of a child. The entry was about a paper by two child development researchers from Cornell University, Gary Evans and Michelle Schamberg. Their proposition is that “A plausible contributor to the income-achievement gap is working-memory impairment in lower-income adults caused by stress-related damage to the brain during childhood“. Working memory has been found to be a reliable predictor of reading and problem solving abilities. From the blog entry:
“At the same time, scientists have studied the cognitive abilities of poor children, and the neurobiological effects of stress on laboratory animals. They’ve found that, on average, socioeconomic status predicts a battery of key mental abilities, with deficits showing up in kindergarten and continuing through middle school. Scientists also found that hormones produced in response to stress literally wear down the brains of animals.”

I called Shanthala from inside the store and asked her what would she have done. Give her the money on the way out, Dini, she said. I wrestled with questions of what rent was she talking about, if the object swaddled in the blanket was really a baby and on and on and on. As I walked back to my car, I gave the lady $10.

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