by Masami Sato
A new experiment is completely changing lives in the rural areas of India by bringing luminosity where there used to be darkness.
An article was published in The New York Times named, “Husk Power for India”. Current, which is routinely available in the lives of most in industrialized nations, is an unimaginable luxury in out-of-the-way corners of emerging countries. What was once fodder for cattle is now used to produce current – 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 life long 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 industrialist because he feels entrepreneurship is a way out for important problems of the society. “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 define there were eight parts to giving as a way to look at this. So, let me map out the eight distinctions; which in effect are often ’stages’ of giving as well.
Phase one: Exigency – salvaging and helping others who are suffering due to natural calamities, epidemic diseases or other insurmountable problems.
Stage two: Relief – providing relief from long-standing hunger, poverty, diseases, handicaps or discrimination which otherwise would continue or worsened because of the lack of information, education or resources.
Stage three: Remedying and defense – internally, bodily and psychologically. Many people carry injuries that may be invisible but could be severely confining their lives. Giving the remedy to release the buried trauma creates better facilities for them while giving proper protection gives them a sense of defense.
Stage four: Training – giving better training, knowledge and skill instruction to create empowered and practical solutions to resource creation while encouraging people to identify their singular talent to survive.
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.
Stage six: Sustainability – working together involving the people in the local environment, creating sustainable community – environmentally and socially.
Phase seven: Empowerment – enabling and motivating the people to release their true ability and power to make a change. In this group of sharing, the aim of giving changes from ‘giving to the people who want’ to ‘giving people a chance to give to others’ and to the society.
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 connection
Two: Sense of contentment
Three: reprieve from ache (our own)
Four: Thankfulness for our own ideas, gifts and conditions
Five: Long-term sense of involvement and fulfillment for our own life
Six: Improved atmosphere for our own life and for the lives of all those we value and cherish
Seven: Soul rewarding stimulation and commitment to our own purpose
Eight: Affection
Giving has many planes and understandings upon the basis of the giver and the beneficiary. And the ‘levels’ do not explain which one is higher than the other. All are imperative.
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 travelling in a small town one day. Four of us had just called a taxi to take us to another nearby town. We dealt with the driver cautiously as our hotel staff had forewarned us about the possible swindle when they see that we were not local.
We chose to stop in front of the local train station for a short interval en route to the town. While the others went to use restrooms, I struck up a conversation with the driver of the taxi, standing nearby. With his limited English vocabulary and a smiling face that showed his black front teeth to advantage, he told me that he lived in the outskirts of the town and that he had a young wife and two kids who attended the local school – I began to feel a relationship 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 arrived we were actually quite shocked to see how he was living. It was almost like the same condition (if not worse) to the lifestyle of people living in slums we had visited previously. From the nice new taxi he was driving, who could have imagined
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 went inside his house, we saw a vessel and a small stove on the floor. His timid young wife raised her head in surprise and withdrew into the small store room (a cupboard size) adjacent to it. As I took in the scene, I saw the neighbours residing next door giving her a few cups across the broken down concrete fence. The young couple did not even have sufficient teacups in their house. There was a single room fitted with one single bed and a pretty old galvanised box near it.
The taxi driver quickly pulled out three hand-woven rugs from the chest and rolled them out on the small patch of mud floor putting 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 cheerfully informed us that he was a dancing expert of the area and pointed at the medals displayed on the recess above his bed. Bent on showing us his dancing skills he at once ran outside. From some place music started coming into the tiny room. He has no arrangement for music in the house, it was flowing in from outside. I wondered where it came from till I saw him bringing his taxi in reverse to the back wall of his house with the doors open and music flowing in from the high volume car radio!
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 every one 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 realised that the sense of discomfort I felt was actually coming from perceiving him as less fortunate. I was thinking that I couldn’t possibly take anything from someone who had so 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 continue to reverberate in my mind, “these are customers, not victims.” I can picture the happy faces of the rural folk who are now pleased to have power in their hamlets and the kids who now can read books and happily do their homework at night.