The Dilemma of the Bleeding-heart Cynic!

By Sandeep Sahu

To give or not to give? How many times have you been confronted with this dilemma when you see a prematurely ageing woman in tattered clothes holding a baby or a haggard looking man all wrapped up in bandages making a desperate plea for some alms at a traffic junction or outside a temple, shopping arcade or any other public place?

If you are the bleeding heart kind, your first instinct is to reach for your pocket and fish out a coin (discreetly making sure you don’t bring out a coin of a bigger denomination) and hand it over to the wretched looking lady or the man with bandages all over his body. If you are the cynical kind, you tend to just ignore the supplicant stretching out his or her arms in begging. But the real problem comes when your heart says “Give”, but your mind says “No”.  You are moved by the wretched condition of the beggar, especially if she has an emaciated looking baby in her arms, and want to help. But the knowledge that this woman, for all you know, could be part of a ‘flourishing’ begging racket holds you back.

While waiting for my quota of paan at my favourite shop at CRP Square in Bhubaneswar some time ago, I suddenly found three children, barely four-five years old, tugging at my shirt, asking for something to eat through gestures. As soon as I gave the boys a five rupee coin, they vanished from the place. My stern looking paanwala then chided me; “Sir, why did you pay these boys? Don’t you know that they are hired by a tout for Rs 100 a day to beg?” He then proceeded to give me a good five-minute talk on how the ‘racket’ operates. When I asked him about the person who has engaged these kids in begging, he pointed to a man sleeping in the shade of a tree at a distance, saying; “He would just booze all day with the money earned by these kids and return them in the evening, only to get them back in business the next morning.” Even for someone who has spent over half his life in the city – and that too in the profession of journalism – this came as both a revelation and a shock.

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This “To pay or Not to Pay’ dilemma, however, is not just restricted to beggars on the streets. About four years ago, I received a call on my mobile from someone in Delhi, who introduced herself as a college going ‘volunteer’ for an organization that generated funds for the treatment of critically ill poor children through donations. She spoke in perfect English and sounded very earnest in her appeal for donations. For good measure, she also volunteered to send the treatment details of the child, the son of a rickshaw puller who she said required an urgent surgery worth Rs 1.5 lakhs, and asked for my email ID. Along with the relevant documents of the AIIMS in New Delhi where the child was to undergo surgery, she also sent me the URL for the Trust she worked for. Moved by the plight of the child and impressed by the earnestness of the volunteer, I sent Rs 2, 000 through internet banking. The next morning, she called again to thank me profusely for my help.

So far so good. But a month or so after this incident, I got another call – this time from a boy – making a similar request. I obliged again, but only to the extent of Rs 1, 000 this time. A few weeks after this, I received another call from the ‘volunteer’ of another Trust (there are apparently plenty of them in the national capital) making the same request. When I asked the volunteer where he got my mobile number from, he said it had been shared by the Red Cross where I had donated blood. I thought long and hard and then remembered that the last time I donated blood was a good 30 years ago, decades before the mobile phone reached Bhubaneswar! The seeds of suspicion having been planted, I now dithered, not sure if my money was really going to be used for the purpose it was meant. But the guy was nothing if not persistent and kept chasing me through phone calls, and long SMSes telling me what a wonderful, kind hearted man I was before I relented and transferred Rs 1,000.

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But after this incident, the journalist in me took over and I grew suspicious of such calls. I consulted a few friends, who I thought were more worldly-wise than me, on what I should be doing. The best piece of advice came from a friend, who said; “If you are keen on doing charity, there is no dearth of deserving people right here. Go to Capital Hospital on any given day and you would find plenty of genuine cases. This way, you can at least make sure your money is spent for the intended purpose.”

Caught up in the daily grind of reporting, I never really went to Capital Hospital nor to any other place in search of ‘deserving’ cases. But the calls from Delhi haven’t stopped coming even now, the last one as recently as this afternoon. If anything, they have become more frequent now. But I have steeled myself enough to disconnect the call every time the caller starts introducing himself/herself as a ‘volunteer’ from some Trust or the other.

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But the dilemma remains. What if the ‘volunteer’ and the Trust are genuine and some poor chap is actually in dire need of help? Am I not being cynical and rather rude in disconnecting the call from the ‘volunteer’? But soon, the cynic in me takes over. Having read and heard about frauds of all kinds, I have often wondered how on earth one can be absolutely certain that he is contributing to a genuine cause.

I have decided to keep charity on hold till I resolve this Hamletesque dilemma.