To Give Or Not To Give

In practice, “to be, or not to be,” isn’t as much an ethical question as the famous Shakespearean soliloquy made it out to be. In books, ethics may be about always doing the right thing, but in real life it’s never that simple. There’s always a caveat - is doing the right thing convenient? If doing the right thing isn’t convenient at all, we train our conscience to take the middle ground of either justification or escapism or just looking the other way. “To beg or not to beg”is as much an escapist dilemma as “to give or not to give” is, and the winner is always escapism.

There’s another story worth telling as a sequel to my “to beg or not to beg” story, particularly for those who perceive my tryst with a homeless child as “one experience with one person” and not “umpteen repetitions of my compassionate offerings”. It’s also one of the early and most trivial ones that seeded my philosophy on giving, or rather, as I would now like to call “sharing”.

Source
I must have been in my teens, early teens I would say. Growing up in a typical third world lower middle class family, I was by no means privileged. Life was quite tough fiscally and otherwise. Far removed from the socioeconomic concepts of the west, extreme poverty didn’t mean inability to afford diapers for a newborn, or pair of socks for the homeless, or a blanket to spend the night in. It meant the only thing one had access to was infested water to drink and polluted air to breath. Everything else was a privilege beyond affordability. It meant searching the public dumpsters for the leftovers. It meant feeling blessed if something edible and wearable was discovered in one of those dumpsters. It meant barely being able to wrap one’s shame in street-picked pieces of rags. It meant sustaining life itself.

I was living with my siblings away from my parents. Fortunately, I had my uncle’s family as our neighbor. As I would always do, one day after school, I dropped in to visit my cousins, five of them with a paraplegic parent.

As I entered their home, I could smell gloom in the air. The mood was one of absolute despair. They were all hungry. Having already missed one meal they had no idea where the next one would come from. Disturbed by their tribulation, I quietly stepped out to figure out if I can do something about it. After a couple of hours of running around I managed to borrow 50 bucks (about $8 at the time) from a friend. I rushed back to rescue the hungry only to find out that they were all getting ready for a night of entertainment after a sumptuous meal donated by a relative of theirs. OMG would I waste a single penny on entertainment when I had no clue if I will have anything to eat when I wake up the next morning?

With the hard-sought cash in my hand, and my hand in my pocket, I turned back and walked away, ashamed of myself for having over-estimated the hunger of the hungry. On that day my quest for solving the - “to give or not to give” - puzzle began.