Guidelines On The Value Of Giving

A new experiment is completely changing lives in the rural areas of India by bringing luminosity where there used to be darkness.

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 reformative businessman because he feels business is the answer to major social problems. "Business leaders must realise that the world's poor need investments more than handouts," he says, adding, "these are customers, not victims."

The article motivated me to think about offering things in a different way that made me ask myself, "what is the most perfect form of giving?" Is it edification, commerce or disaster aid? There are so many ways to create a difference. One way of giving can seem more productive or practical than other ways depending on the way it is given expression, viewed or put into practice.

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.

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: Creative investment - lending a hand, money or resources to those who have great potential to make a difference. This gets leveraged many times as the resources increase and passed on to many others who again make more out of the opportunities given.

Stage six: Tenability - working together with the people in the local surroundings, creating tenable groups - ambiance-wise and reciprocally.

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.

Phase eight: Caring - just doing whatever we want to do to cherish and care for others. No tactic or expected result exists in this phase of giving. 'Giving' does not even exist here in the conventional sense of the word, as there is no sense of ownership or reasoning or yearning to alter anything. This is where we do not even have to worry about anything, we give as a part of our own delightful sense of being.

What we also see is that at each of these eight phases of sharing there are many things that the giver gets in return.

One: Sense of relationship

Two: Sense of well being

Three: respite from hurt (our own)

Four: Thankfulness for our own ideas, gifts and conditions

Five: Long-term sense of commitment and contentment for our own life

Six: Better ambiance 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: Care

Sharing has many stages and sensations based upon the donor and getter. And the 'phases' do not detail which one is of more importance than the other. All are mandatory.

I was fortunate to have an experience early in 2008 while travelling with a group of dedicated businessmen through India to see how we could be more useful in our giving. I was blessed to have one exceptional happening that made me think about what 'effectual giving' actually 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 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 appreciated the fact of his having such a wonderful family and told him that I too had two little ones of almost the same ages as his. When the others were back the driver suddenly invited us to come to his house and have lunch. I took it only as a formality that was customary courtesy. But after taking us to the town center and leaving us there, he told us that he would wait for us until all our wandering in the town was over. And he really did. I was actually quite astonished to see him still remaining glued to the side of the road next to his taxi more than one hour later. We got into the taxi and he drove fast up the road to where he had his family.

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 drove into the narrow unsealed street between small houses that were made with roughcast concrete blocks and mud painted walls, we almost regretted about saying yes to his invite. For a brief moment I felt pangs of guilt. "How could I go to this man's home who didn't seem to have anything and I didn't even bring any food or gifts for his family", I thought.

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 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.

Soon the cups of tea and some snacks arrived. All his children and children from the neighborhood came to see us and stood in the doorway. All six of us were totally squashed in the tiny room. I curiously asked him where all his children were sleeping. I thought they probably had another space somewhere. To my surprise, he cheerfully pointed the chest and said it was their bed with his beaming smile.

He gleefully told us that he was a dancing champion in town and pointed to some trophies on the shelf above the bed. Keen to show us his dancing skills he suddenly dashed outside. From nowhere music filled the tiny room. He didn't have any music system in the house, it was coming from outside. I was curious so I stood up to see him reversing his taxi right against the back wall of his house with the doors wide open with car radio on full volume!

The time quickly passed (dancing together and having more cups of tea) and it was finally time to say thank you for their great hospitality and head on our way. As we stood up to leave and thank him and his wife, he reached to the best looking rug on the bed, rolled it up and handed it to us. It was one of the only few things he had. I could not believe he offered 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 realised that the feeling of restlessness I felt was in reality the result of seeing him as less privileged. I was feeling that I couldn't probably receive anything from someone who owned too little.

But did he really have nothing much? Maybe he had much more - many more.

Maybe the real present we could have given him then was to receive his present in utmost deference and thankfulness.

Every act of sharing and taking are indispensable for us to fill our world with profusion and satisfaction in equal measure for both sharer and taker. We can start doing this instead of evaluating and validating one over another. The beautiful act of sharing and taking requires no additional elucidation.

Manoj Sinha's words resound in my mind once again, "these are customers, not victims." I can visualise the eager faces of the village people who are now thrilled to have current in their hamlets and their little ones who now can now read and write and learn even at night.

About the Author

Discover more about how Buy1GIVE1 (BOGO) can transform your business using Cause Marketing.

by: Masami Sato
Total views: 2 Word Count: 1871 Date: Wed, 21 Jul 2010 Time: 5:26 AM 0 comments

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