Good morning to you kind sirs and madams, it’s been a week
since the last post and quite a lot has happened, most important of those being
Sarah returned from the ashram a week early. I can’t say I’m surprised. A week
earlier I had travelled with her up to give the place the once over and pay for the
course. There was something which just didn’t feel right.
The place was very impressive, a monumental gateway stood at
the entrance and looked out over a lake. It was part of a multinational
organisation with centres amongst others in France and the Caribbean, so no
small concern. We entered the grounds and were directed to the reception, it
was cool and quiet and yet for me had a strange feel. There were a few course participants
and staff milling around and it felt – strange. A forced silence rather than
the natural calm I sometimes get when entering holy places. At the time I wasn’t
sure if I was projecting my own feelings regarding organised religion and amateur
night psychobabble onto the place or I was subconsciously picking up on an “atmosphere”
which had resonances with a bad experience I’d had of a poorly arranged
Tavistock Group. There were pictures on
the walls of various course intakes, groups of between a dozen and twenty folk
all in matching t-shirts all with the forced smile you get on team photos.
Other signs were up one which gave the dress code, no above the knee shorts,
nothing revealing or “immodest” and directions to the “boutique” where you
could buy “appropriate clothing”, signs re: handing in your mobile, there was
nothing specifically for me to dislike about the place but collectively it felt
“wrong”.
Sarah had decided she wanted to do the Ayurvedic health and
medicine course, it covered the principles of ayurveda and massage. The
programme was to be an intensive two weeks, starting at 5:30 every morning and
the days filled until 10 p.m. A mixture of formal lessons, reading, homework,
meditation and yoga. The first solid thing which made me twitch was the fact
that they wanted us to pay by visa, of itself not a bad thing as it gives a
degree of protection, but the payment was to be made via the web to a corporate
headquarters in Canada. There are many reasons why a company might want this to
be how they do business but I wondered if it was more to do with extracting
profit from the business in India where there are strict rules on how much
money can be taken out of the country rather than providing an easy reassuring means
of payment. We insisted on paying in cash in rupees, interestingly for a
business in India they had to check on the exchange rate before confirming the
price. Imagine going into ASDA, part of an American company and when you get to
the checkout being told they need to check on the dollar exchange rate before
they could give you your bill, I think you’d draw your own conclusions about
where the money was going to end up.
A week later Sarah headed off to the Ashram and was left to
fend for myself, a week I filled with watching England get slaughtered in the
first test match and movies on cable TV. I was going to be fine, it was Sarah I
was worried for.
During the week we spoke little on the phone, the reception
was poor even by Indian standards and the programme filled days didn’t help. On
Saturday, at the end of the first week I had a call from Sarah obviously
distressed saying she was coming home early. But she had been told she would
have to wait until the Director gave his approval. (This was actually the final
straw and confirmed to her that she had made the right decision to leave). I
told her to tell them that illegal detention was a serious matter and if she
wasn’t back in Kovalam in 90 minutes my next call would be to the Police and
then the British Embassy. My threat was unnecessary as she sorted it herself,
not without having to counter further attempts at controlling her, she rang an
hour later to say she was in the taxi on her way.
Once home Sarah recounted tales of a parental, controlling system,
and how she had been made to feel that failure to comply with the ridiculous was
failure on her part. Sarah has learnt a lot from the ashram, some things about
massage, some things about Ayurvedic treatment, but most of all to trust her
own judgement. In the past she admits would have just gone along with all the
crap to get along with folk. Not now, the Sarah I adore knows who and what she
is, I am very proud of her. She went, literally bought the T-shirt, wore it and
then told them they could keep it.
It’s not the self-assured, grounded individuals who now give
me concern but the vulnerable, lost and
confused who often attend this kind of environment in the hope of “finding
themselves”.
We spent the next few days relaxing on the beach, swimming,
and enjoying being together.
Charity
The inequities of life here are immense, true India is beginning
to build a “middle class” and literacy rates amongst the young are much better
than in some other parts of the world but choices for the very poor are
crushingly limited. We see examples of it every day, in the cities it hits you
hardest. When you first get here looking through western eyes it’s easy to be
over whelmed, the road side shacks, the slums, the homeless, the beggars, cries
of “one rupee, one rupee!”. It would be surprising if you didn’t want to help,
to do…. Something! But what? Are you giving that 5 rupee coin to the
unfortunate in front of you or to a beggar master? Is the charity a real
organisation or a scam? It’s hard to tell and in a two week stay and there is
no way you can know for certain.
For some this leads to a sort of paralysis,
fear of being taken for a mug and the intensity of it all makes them withdraw
into their 5 star hotels, sit on the “Diana Bench”, cruise the backwaters in a
luxury rice boat and to shut out the reality of day to day Indian life, it’s
just too much. So if this is how you think you will react should you make your
donation to Oxfam and just go somewhere else?
Definitely not. Even in your air-conned room you are
supporting some of the poorest folk here. For you to be here your hotel was
built and is being maintained, your sheets are being washed, your food
prepared, your pool cleaned, your taxi or tuk-tuk driven, your sunbed tended
to, local shops and businesses feel the benefit of the trickle down of hard
cash, and even your rubbish is being recycled. In some ways it’s the best form
of charity, it rewards enterprise and is sustainable. True the rich take more
than their share but they also spend at least some of that cash. You can
however maximise the impact of your contribution by as one beach boy hiring sunbeds
calls it “spreading the love”, don’t just eat in the hotel use local businesses
small and large, buy in different shops, reward good service and drive up quality.
It’s a painless way to spread your “donations”.
N.B. What I’m definitely NOT
saying is you should pay too much for goods or services out of guilt or by
applying western prices to what you buy. This creates expectation inflation for
the locals as well as tourists which helps no one, try to think in rupees
rather than in how much it costs in pounds or euros. Also if you haven’t had
the service you require tell them kindly, that way they can improve and get
more business in the future.
But what if you want to directly target your money at the
poorest or most disadvantaged? Just relying on “Trickle down” is at best a random
and uncertain process, the money could just as well be being spent on gold.
Side Note- Gold is an
Indian fixation, in an uncertain world it has intrinsic value and cultural
importance but it siphons money out of the economy locking it up and preventing
that money being invested in growth, it’s a real problem here.
As a first port of call talk to the expat community, but be
careful and make sure they really know what they are talking about. Visit the
charity concerned and don’t just listen to the sales pitch, listen with your
eyes, see what they are doing. Are they busy? Do they have a Facebook page
(some will), search for them on the web, look to see what others have said. Are
they associated with a particular religion? If so you may be disenfranchising some
of the poorest folk. (We visited a Childrens’ Home attached to a church once,
the kids slept 15 in a room on bare earth floor, next-door there was an
impressive brand new Evangelical Church. The children, performed Christmas carols
for us, the only songs they had been taught, it felt like the organ grinder had
produced his troop of performing monkeys and was rattling his tin. We gave the
children some sweets and pens and left).
Beware of charities proposing western solutions to third
world “problems”.
First question to ask is Is this a real problem or just
different? I think this can be a real issue for those with limited experience
of life, as an illustration I’ll use gap year students traveling for the first
time in India, though the thinking isn’t limited to them. In the main (and
please excuse the stereotyping, its for illustrative purposes only) by Indian
standards they have come from an extremely privileged background, just the
flight to get here will have cost much more money than many Indian families
will earn in a year. They are well educated, want to help and… are innocents. All they have really known is
school/university in a western society and they find themselves in a place
which is similar but alien where they are exposed to serious poverty for the
first time. They want, they NEED to help. They see “problems” everywhere and
they know how to make things right, after all they have spent their entire
lives “solving problems” and “answering questions” with the “right answer”.
Obviously they are the people to “fix” all India’s woes. Grey is not a colour they recognise.
I had an interesting
conversation with my younger daughter Chloe a couple of weeks ago, she spent much
of the summer living in a Delhi slum and visited Mumbai as part of her course on social anthropology.
On her return what she found interesting was a lecture back in the UK where
Mumbai’s airport slum was discussed and the reaction of her fellow students. They
were appalled and thought everyone was trying to get out and the answer was to dismantle
the slum and rehouse everyone. Chloe was equally appalled, but at their lack of
understanding of the reality of a working successful community working to
survive live and love against the odds. Not that there weren’t ways lives could
be improved but the western solution, bring in the bulldozers just was so wrong.
(Incidentally this approach has been tried in India – it was as you would
expect a disaster).
There are lots of “problems” here but lack of access to choice
and opportunity, be that from birth, lack of education, sexual inequality,
caste, religion, education I could go on and on, is the killer. To improve things increasing
access to those opportunities and choices is key. If you are looking for
somewhere to invest your donation I strongly suggest you focus your money on
charities trying to do just that, in whatever way works wherever they are.
Kev
28-11-13
