Last month, I finished reading
The city of joy by Dominique Lapierre. It gave me some insight into the plight of the poor and the homeless of India : an India that I never knew.Oh, I have seen slums and beggars all my life, there has never been any dearth of that; but a couple of years ago I had decided that they're all worthless bums who have become so used to not standing up for themselves and not working, that they are not worth paying attention to. In short, I adopted the attitude of the majority and chose to completely ignore their existence. Moreover, a couple of months later, I read the famous Ayn Rand novels,
Fountainehead and
Atlas Shrugged, which somehow reinforced my convictions concerning these matters. I mean, these novels draw a rather idealistic and romantic picture of the world : completely black and white. In
Fountainehead Peter's girlfriend devotes most of her time to doing charitable work and she is ultimately shown to end up as a bitter and confused wreck of her former self. In
Atlas Shrugged the phrase
brother's keeper was ridiculed to an extremity. The whole point was very simple : every person is responsible for himself. And it's true, really. Every person's first and foremost responsibility is his own welfare. But does that give a person who has done well for himself, the right to be contemptuous of everyone else who hasn't? That's a big question, as I find myself being contemptuous of a lot of people, and of course I always feel I'm justified. And it's not just me, a lot of people I know harbour this kind of an attitude.
As I always like to say, everything is context-dependent. The question stated above is too general.Let's make it specific.I had started this post by talking about the poor, so let's limit the discussion to them. Does a beggar deserve our contempt? A couple of months ago, I'd have said yes; becuase I felt that he's perfectly capable of doing some kind of work and if he's not working it's just because he doesn't want to. But now, I'm not sure whether this is the complete truth. Yes, he
is capable of doing work, and it may be that he desperately wants to do work, but what if he can get no work to do? Nobody likes to be insulted, or to be at the receiving end of a policeman's stick as if he were a rabid dog, or to be ignored by the mass as one ignores a pile of trash, or to be looked at with disgust as if he were a pile of dung by the roadside.Would a beggar really have refused a chance to do productive work, had he been given that chance? And it cannot be dismissed with the high-handed aphorism of, 'we create our own opportunities'.
The city of joy tells the true story of Hasari Pal, a farmer who migrated to Calcutta with his family when he could no longer work at his farm due to prolonged drought. He tried to create an opportunity for himself by migrating to the big city, where he was sure he would get work to support his family.In the overcrowded city, there were thousands like him, and there were not enough jobs for all. For a long time they slept on the pavement and the children begged during the day while the father tried to find work. When he couldn't find work for a long time, the severely undernourished man sold his blood for money, so that he could feed his family. Knowing that much about his life, could anyone hold this man in contempt? If not, then how dare we be contemptous of another whose story we do not know? It is our choice whether we want to help them or not; but we have no right to insult them.
