How to deal with the beggars

Nick-H

Hey, Deeps. Yours was a valid point of view, often expressed, and a good starting point for conversation. Please don't feel that I was jumping on you. IM (WELCOME: I just realise you are a new poster) can be a place of robust controversy sometimes, but almost always friendly.

Most of your post was about doing more for poor people than I ever have just handing out a few coins. If my response was harsh then please excuse me. It wasn't meant to be. It's just that I feel this one of those questions to which many people want an absolute answer and there isn't one.

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amogasiddhi

Even ten thousand rupees woudn't change the life of a single beggar for very long, would a few thousand punds change your life imeasurably? No.
Idealism is wonderful for the mind but for the real world where 8 year old girls carry 6 month old babies on their hips, beggging you to give her money so that she can feed 'her baby' or worse, that you buy her powdered milk from a shop, she'll show you where from don't worry, you buy it, being a worldly minded individual and as 'we're all human beings' etc etc blah, blah, then she thanks you, asks you for the change you recieved, you give it, she walks off with the baby, waits until she thinks you are out of sight, then goes back to the shop where she trades the untouched milk in for some money. But what does she want with money you ask? She takes the monney to the other beggar who sells dope/ low grade heroin/ etc buys what she can and takes it to her father/ uncle/ pimp/ person who threatened to kill her if she doesn't and so it continues.
This is of course only one example and though there are millions of beggars in India, the state (who are also human beings albeit of a different caste but of the same religion/ planet, as in your case) does little to prevent the cause of such poverty. So the women get rapes, have babies, their other children use the babies as emotional blackmail in the way they were shown and which has been handed down for countless generations, and you, the good hearted traveller/ guest/ visitor buy drugs for her keeper. That makes you a party to one of the most gruesome aspects of Indian culture and one which no politician dares to approach, Indian or otherwise.
So tell me Earthling, are you a visitor or a missionary? Can you remotely hope to complete your mission and save them all from certain death. A Hindu would tell you that it is their fate, their Karma and who is anyone to argue? You are talking about changing hundreds of years of, as in Lonely Planet's own words, 'vibrant culture'.
Is it really any business of yours? It certainly is nothing to do with me as it is well withing the realms of the educated ones with their essays and qualifications; easily recognised by their inability to actually do anything they are talking and verbosely alluding to.
Remember why you went to India. I do and that's why i'm not still there joining the masses of people who are already there who one day hope India will be just like wheerever they are from. Is that your idea of helping? It's not mine as I am merely an observer.

Namaste(smiles like a crocodile)...you come i give puja.....I holy man, this holy place.....3500 rupees please.

PS: why is it the most 'holy' places on the planet are the ones with the most social deprivation? You don't get this problem in Wales boyyo!

Nick-H

The way I am seeing this thread at the moment has a Google ad wihich has turned the headline into..


There. Google is wiser than any of us.

Matty Gee

People beg because they are poor.

People go on holiday because they have excess money....

Shouldn't be too hard to figure it out should it....?

If you don't give, you are pure smegma.

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Nick-H

OK, amogasiddhi doesn't believe that anyone else's life or problem is any business of his.

So what would R10,000 do for a beggar?

It would pay my rent for nearly 2 months, or my daily expenses for maybe a month.

Perhaps those with greater experience of Indian economy could suggest what they might do if, unempleyed and living on the street, they were given R10,000.

I suspect it might...

Get a family into a one-room accomadation for quite a few months
or
Get a child into school for a year or two, including uniforms etc
or
pay, if not for surgery, then possibly for much-needed medical treatment
or
buy a lot of food for quite some time.

I think it would make a very considerable difference.

Of course, living on the street is not an essential part of this: I guess that not all beggars live in the street; not every one who lives on the street is a beggar.

Nick-H

Well, Matty Gee... concise and to the point!

I do feel that those who never give or help in anyway must have sad lives. But perhaps they are doing something else to contribute to humanity; who knows...

randomviolins

Amogasiddhi, I must say the nihilism is very unbecoming in you.
Few of us can change the whole world all by ourselves, but collectively we can move mountains.

Matty Gee, well put.
Except, what exactly do you have against smegma? (And surely pure smegma is better than adulterated smegma ... )

Nick-H

What we can do as individuals is sometimes make one person's life a tiny bit better even if only for one day.

crvlvr

To Give or not to Give, is that the question?

If it makes you feel better (and less guilty) then give by all means. But do not assume that all the money you give is going to the beggar. Most of them are “employees” of a local mafia boss and have to turn in their collections at the end of them. In return they may receive accommodation and some food. A short film, The Elephant Boy depicts this well. Do keep this in mind before you contribute to this organized operation. Most of the beggars do it by choice (as an employee), or are indentured to the mafia boss. They have chosen to this “line of work” over manual labor as it’s easier.

Personally I give rarely, and only to people who are too old or disabled to be employed. There are enough cottage industries in India in India to keep the women with kids employed. All that beautiful hand made fabric, clothes and shoes that come out of India are made in peoples homes -- usually by women with kids. It would be sad if they gave up their art for begging, just because its more lucrative.

amogasiddhi

If you want to give money to a beggar, go ahead, although i would have thought that food would be a more positive thing to give as it couldn't be ripped from them in the same way that clothes could be by a bigger beggar. I've seen fights break out over less in India. How do you give to one and not another? Who are you to judge one person's plight over another's? Who are you to judge me? On what criteria do you base your opinion to help someone?
What I think India is all about is survival of the fittest and under some pretty uncompromising religious laws. Tough justice but then what do i know, i'm not a Hindu and in any case, my understanding of this is that the sooner they reach their next life the more chance there is that their positive Karma from this life will help them into a more fortunate rebirth. All that praying would then come in useful for the true believer. What you could be doing is lengthening their suffering by not being around when the money runs out and they can no longer support their newly financed addiction. Where will you be then? On holiday somewhere else no doubt!
Don't judge me by your standards folks at least I don't pretend to be some sort of wannabee martyr. move mountains? are you mad or do you fancy trying your arm at being the next Ambedkar Ji? If so, do let us all know how you get on, if you live past your first public appearance; you would most certainly put an awful lot of people's noses out of joint but then, you don't care about them, you're only interested in the money right? If you must help someone, go for the jugular and quench the flames of corruption in India, then the mountain will disappear.
All the best.

randomviolins

I have been accused of madness on occasion, but that's another story.

I do not think it is very constructive to decide to not help anyone just because you can't help everyone. You have to start somewhere. Like someone else said, you can give a little of what you have until you run out/reach your limit and then that's enough.

Being a secular humanist rather than religious type myself, I don't try deconstruct the religious or philosophical motivations people have for their behavior when it comes to my deciding whether I want to help other people. If I did, I would find myself more often than not deciding not to ever help anyone because most people don't share my philosophical/religious orientation. And in a country like India with so many different religions, I think this is really the only sane way to try to live with people whose backgrounds differ from your own.

And even those of us who live in countries such as the US that like to pride themselves on such lofty notions as "transparency" in government and business dealings don't fool ourselves into believing that ALL the money you give for anything (government, business, charity, social organizations, religious organizations) actually gets where it's supposed to go. You give a little and hope just some of what you are giving gets where you intend it. The rest is just overhead.

temp

My view is that this is a recipe to create dependency and encourage living on charity. crlvr has the right idea about begging in India.

If at all you want to give, give intelligently: a means to earn a living (knowledge, job, etc), a microloan to kickstart a woman's small business, and so on. That's the kind of help that'll help genuinely disadvantaged people meet you half way in bettering their own lot. Most social programmes in India today work with this philosophy of having help ready but only for people who take it upon themselves to meet halfway. Grameen Bank, the microloan programme for women is one example of intelligent giving.

And this idea extends to countries too. Persistent aid programmes are a good recipe to prevent a country from ever figuring out how to do things on its own, use its means etc. Just as an example of this in action, one of the reasons India has an IT industry today is because it was forced to develop its own supercomputers when denied them by the US in the 70s (nuke embargo). Supercomputers were essential for monsoon and other forecasts, hence spurring the need to develop expertise in that area.

Just my view. You're free to give but you're only propagating poverty. And if you're going to give to those who appear the most needy or more horrifying, guess what. You'll find even more needier and gutwrenching-appearing people next time around. Your behavior would've taught them what would attract your giving, essentially how to market poverty better to attract greater funds.

The Indian govt exhorts tourists not to give to roadside beggars, but to give intelligently to appropriate charities if they wish, but tourists seem to love hoards of beggars hounding them given the way they keep making this rewarding for the beggars. As an Indian, I haven't seen more than a couple of beggars in my daily commutes in Mumbai for a long time. The ones who're still into the business probably know where it pays now.. Guess I should really thank the tourists for this.

amogasiddhi

All this talk of money, it's like trying to catch the snake that bit you so that when you get to the hospital (on a rickshaw) you can show the thing to a doctor who will then find the anti-venom after being bitten too. You just get bitten again and again when what you should do is remove yourself from the situation and stop dragging others into your mess.
If you now try to shift your mountainous mind away from the snake or, as in this case money, you'll see that all you have done is to apply your own standards to a situation without any real understanding of what it is all about. You think money is the cure when money is the poison.....I feel a glam-rock song coming on. I agree that giving is a charitable act though I do not expect anyone to do as I do in the same way as you do and money isn't the cure. You appear to be conditioned into responding in a particular way to this issue and all I hear is 'give 'em money', have you stopped for long enough to really think about trying to imagine yourself in a similar situation? No really, get past all the filth and squalor and imagine what it could be like. You're now an addict and the pusher is the person with the money upon whom your existence entirely depends.
Temp put it more concisely than I but I think we're dancing to the same tune.....well, I say 'dancing', I mean headbanging of course, none of this namby-pamby dancing nonsense.

randomviolins

Amogasiddhi, you are right. It's not all about money per se. (Earlier in the thread I mentioned how a friend of mine carries food to give out.) It so happens that money fits easily in one's pocket and is almost always on hand when the need arises, unlike other things that can be given to the needy. Money is just a readily transferable form of time/energy/efforts.

I also agree that it would be ideal to be able to donate to worthy charitable organizations and self-help ventures. But as a tourist (yes, just a tourist, not a scout of a major philanthropic organization, and not even an Indian citizen), I don't usually want to deal with the hassle of seeking out the perfect charitable organization to give to and then actually going through the efforts of making the donation. I'd rather spend the little time I have seeing the country and making friends. So I go for the simpler, if imperfect, option of giving to those whose misery is right in front of my eyes.

But that's just me. Chacun a son gout.

cwcwdavid

I never ever give to beggars despite having spent much of the last years in countries with almost as much poverty as India. Why? The reasons well described in this thread ... I believe (in some cases know) they are often either mafia 'owned' and run or will buy drugs which is not something I want to help them with.

The problem with charities is that often 40%, 60% or even 90% will be spent on salary and costs for the westerners running it. I would rather give money straight to someone who needs it.
The problem with giving anything saleable (even food) is it gets resold and you just contributed to the mafia. Sometimes the remains of of food you have is better since it cannot be resold. It's also an easy way to know if the beggar is hungry wince a hungry person will not refuse a half eaten plate of rice and chicken. Plenty beggars do especially in tourist places.

My alternative when staying in Bangkok for example where the usual amount for a beggar would be 5 - 10 baht (0.25 $) , was to give 100 baht now and again to someone who is collecting bottles from the garbage. It solves my problem of guilt without supporting all the bad things. They are of course also hopelessly underpaid for doing something useful.

Creates a differrent feeling - problem though. The reaction of someone who probably makes 20 baht or under for a whole nights hard and dirty work collecting bottles to being handed 5 times that is varied and strange! Sometimes makes me feel very ashamed that a small amount (2 euro) that I can just give away without thinking about it is so significant to someone else.

I even got to the point of folding the note really small so that I could bugger off after handing it over before it was totally apparrent how much. It's also strange to offer someone money who isn't asking for it. I usually say hello and ask "do you want?"

Maybe an idea if you want to help some folk but hear the cry of don't support the begging mafia. Of course if everyone did this there would soon be a new mafia of people forced to pretend to collect bottles so that dumb tourists will rain money on them.