Ezine Articles

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.

Raised in the rural state of Bihar, Manoj Sinha understood what it was like to sit in darkness. Being an engineer with Intel Corporation he had all the ability to bring alive the dream of a lifetime. He led the advancement of his power equipment that produces electricity from rice husks and other farm wastes and now he trades it to hamlets 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: 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.

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.

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: Cherishing – just doing whatever we like to do to tend and care for others. No approach or expected upshot exists in this stage of offering. ‘Giving’ does not even exist here in the physical sense of the word, as there is no sense of owning or decision or craving to modify things. This is where we do not even have to consider anything, we give out of a sense of our own fulfilling sensations.

What we also find is that at each of these eight stages of giving there are different things that the giver receives.

One: Sense of connection

Two: Sense of comfort

Three: Relief from pain (our own)

Four: Gratification for our own understanding, talents and situations

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 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 stopped in front of the local train station for a short break on the way. While the others disappeared off to use the bathroom, I started a conversation with our taxi driver standing next to the taxi. With very limited English and a full smile exposing his blackened front teeth, he told me that he had a house on the outskirts of the town and he had a young wife and two children who went to the local school – I started to feel connected to 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 walked into his house, we saw a pan and small stove on the mud floor. His very shy wife nodded blushing in surprise and disappeared into the small storeroom (a cupboard size) next to it. As I looked in, I saw the next-door neighbours handing over some teacups to his wife over the crumbled concrete fence. They didn’t even have extra teacups in their house. There was only one small room fitted out with one single bed and an old galvanised chest next to it.

The cab driver swiftly took out three hand-woven rugs from the galvanised box and placed it neatly on the small space of the mud floor keeping 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 courteously begged off his gift and moved out waving goodbye to all the people waving back at us. We got real baffled about the whole affair. Should we have paid them something as they surely had only too little money? Should we have consented to take the cherished gift he made us?

As I was thinking about this soul-lifting happening a few days afterwards, I was wondering about refusing his gift. He looked quite dejected that we didn’t agree to take the gift. It wasn’t only the fact of declining the gift that crossed 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 perfect gift we could have given him then was to accept his gift in total surrender and gratefulness.

All acts of giving and receiving are necessary for us to fill our world with abundance and fulfillment equally for both giver and receiver. We can start doing this instead of judging and justifying one over another. The pure act of giving and receiving requires no further explanation.

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. – 35634

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