A new development is revolutionizing many lives in the hamlets of India by bringing brightness where there used to be blackness.
The New York Times published an article titled, \”Husk Power for India\”. Electricity, which is prevalent in the lives of many in developed nations, is a pure luxury in remote areas of developing ones. What was once fed to animals now is used to generate electricity – rice husks.
Being brought up in the pastoral Bihar State, Manoj Sinha knew what it was like to be without light at night. Being an engineer with Intel Corporation he had all the competence to bring a lifelong idea to fruition. He led the creation of his power generation equipment from rice husks and other wastes from farms and now he sells power to rural areas across India.
Sinha is what could be called a social entrepreneur because he feels business is a solution to key social issues. \”Business leaders must realise that the world\’s poor need investments more than handouts,\” he says, adding, \”these are customers, not victims.\”
The article inspired me to think about giving in a different way leading me to ask myself, \”what is the most effective form of giving?\” Is it education, commercial activity or disaster relief? There are so many ways to make a difference. One way of giving can seem more effective or sustainable than other ways depending on the way it is expressed, looked at or implemented.
I then came to delineate there were eight segments to giving as a way to see this. So, let me chart out the eight differences; which in effect are often \’stages\’ of giving as well.
Stage one: Necessity – saving and helping others who are afflicted by natural catastrophe, contagious diseases or other unmanageable conditions.
Stage two: Reprieve – providing reprieve from long-standing malnutrition, penury, illnesses, handicaps or inequity which otherwise would prolong or get worsened because of the lack of perception, edification or resources.
Phase three: Curing and defending – morally, bodily and spiritually. Many people carry scars that may be invisible but strongly constricting their lives. Giving the cure to release the long-standing suffering creates more chances for them while giving necessary defense gives them a feeling of security.
Stage four: Education – giving better education, information and skill training to create empowered and creative solutions to resource generation while supporting individuals to discover their unique talent to thrive.
Stage five: Inspired investment – giving a help, capital or resources to those who have great talent to alter the situation. This gets used many times as the resources become more and passed on to other people who again produce more out of the prospects given.
Phase six: Maintainability – working collectively involving the people in the local surroundings, creating maintainable society – ecologically and communally.
Stage seven: Empowerment – empowering and inspiring the people to unleash their true potential and motivation to make a difference. In this group of giving, the aim of giving changes from \’giving to the people who are in need\’ to \’giving people opportunity to give to others\’ and to the community.
Stage eight: Loving – just doing whatever we feel to do to love and care for others. No strategy or expected outcome exists in this stage of giving. \’Giving\’ does not even exist here in the traditional sense of the word, as there is no sense of possession or judgment or desire to change anything. This is where we do not even have to think about anything, we give as a part of our own joyful experience.
What we also perceive is that at each one of these eight stages of giving there are distinctive things that the donor gets back.
One: Sense of relationship
Two: Sense of contentment
Three: respite from hurt (our own)
Four: Gratitude for our own knowledge, skills and circumstances
Five: Long-term sense of commitment and contentment for our own life
Six: Better ambience for our own life and for the lives of others we treasure and revere
Seven: Soul fulfilling inspiration and dedication to our own purpose
Eight: Affection
Giving has many levels and experiences depending on the giver and the receiver. And the \’stages\’ do not describe which one is more important than the other. All are necessary.
I was gifted with an experience early in 2008 while travelling with a group of dedicated entrepreneurs through India to see how we could be more effective in our giving. I was blessed to have one particular experience that made me think about what \’effective giving\’ really meant.
We were in a small town one day. Four of us had just called a taxi to take us to another town in the vicinities. We bargained with the driver with care as our hotel staff had told us beforehand that we could be duped since we were not local.
We halted briefly in front of the local train station for a short recess on the way. While the others went to use the restroom, I tried to chat with our taxi driver standing near his vehicle. With his limited knowledge of English and a wonderful smile that showed his blackened front teeth, he told me that he had a house on the suburbs of the town and he had a sweet wife and two lovely kids who went to the local school – I felt a strong bonding with him.
I congratulated him on having such a loving family and told him that I also had two children similar ages to his. When the others returned he spontaneously invited us to come to his house for lunch. I thought it was just a friendly courtesy he wanted to show at first. However, after dropping us off in the town centre, he insisted that he would wait for us until we finished our exploration in town. And he did. I was actually quite surprised to see him still waiting at the side of the road standing next to his taxi more than hour later. We jumped back into the taxi and he zoomed off up the road to where his family lived.
When we landed there we were quite surprised to see the way he was living. It was in fact quite similar (if not worse) to the existence of the slum dwellers we had visited before that. From the bright new taxi he was driving, who could have pictured this
As he reached the narrow open street in between shanties that were made with rough concrete blocks and mud walls, we felt guilty about accepting his invitation. For a brief moment I was nonplussed. \”How could I accept the hospitality of this man who didn\’t seem to have anything at all and I didn\’t even bring any gift that could be a help to his family\”, I told myself.
As we got into his house, we saw a small pot and a stove on the mud floor. His shy sweet wife smiled and blushed at the sight of visitors and vanished into the cupboard sized storeroom of the house. As I looked around, I saw the man\’s neighbours giving the woman a few cups over the crumbling concrete walls. They simply didn\’t have enough cups in their house. There was just a single small room that had a lone cot and an old galvanised trunk adjacent to it.
The driver hastily drew out three hand-woven mats from the trunk and spread them out on whatever little space there was on the mud floor and put one on the bed.
Steaming cups of tea and hot snacks arrived soon. Both his kids as well as kids from the neighbouring houses came to see us and remained at the doorway. The six of us could just squeeze into the tiny room. I was curious to know where his children were sleeping. I thought maybe they had another space somewhere. To my astonishment, he just pointed at the chest and said with his happy smile that it was their bed.
He happily told us that he was an amateur dancer in the town and showed us some plaques on the sill above the bed. Enthusiastic to show us his dancing proficiency, he ran outside all at once. From somewhere music came flowing into the tiny room. He had no apparatus for music within the house, it was coming from outside. Surprised, I looked around to see him reversing his vehicle towards the back of his house keeping the doors open with the radio of the car blaring forth!
The time moved fast (with his dancing and the many more cups of tea that followed) and very soon it was time to thank them for their great warmth and courtesy and make our move. As we got ready to leave and express our gratitude to him and his wife, he pulled out the best of all the rugs he had, and just gave it to us. It was one of the very few things he owned. It was impossible to believe that he was offering it to us.
We all respectfully refused his gift and came out saying goodbye to everyone waving at us. We got perplexed about this whole thing. Should we have offered some cash to the family as they obviously had limited means? Should we have agreed to take his wonderful gift?
As I was thinking about this life-changing experience a few days later, I thought about the refusal of his gift. He looked disappointed that we didn\’t take the gift. It wasn\’t just about saying no to the gift that stuck in my mind.
I understood that the sense of unease I felt was really ensuing from viewing him as unfortunate. I was perhaps thinking that I couldn\’t possibly accept something from a person who had very little.
But did he actually have modest means? Maybe he had other things – a lot more.
Maybe the real present we could have given him then was to receive his present in utmost deference and thankfulness.
All actions of gifting and getting are essential for us to fill our world with plenty and contentment equally for both giver and getter. We can begin doing this instead of assessing and defending one over the other. The perfect act of gifting and getting needs no further clarification.
Manoj Sinha\’s words echo in my mind once again, \”these are customers, not victims.\” I can imagine the smiling faces of the villagers who are now proud to have electricity in their villages and the children who now can read books and learn in their homes at night.
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