ZIONISM UNDER ATTACK

Background In November 1947, Palestine was partitioned by the United Nations into a Jewish state and an Arab state with Jerusalem administered by the UN. Following its independence and subsequent war with Jordan and Egypt, 78% of Palestine was now in Israel's hands. Following the war of 1967, Israel occupied the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem and continues to do so today.While the concept of Zionism, of a Jewish state for Jews, had its detractors before the foundation of Israel, these objections were rooted in philosophy rather than in practice. The actualization of Zionism over the last 61 years has been another matter altogether.Definitions of anti-Zionism range from the religious to the political, an inflammable debate not likely to be resolved any time soon. My own definition of anti-Zionism is neither anti-semitic nor does it call for the destruction or elimination of the state of Israel. It simply asserts that it is impossible for a Jewish state to be democratic. If Israel is a democratic state, then it belongs to all its citizens, at least 20% of whom are not Jews. A democratic state does not withhold equal rights from those of its citizens who are not Jewish.

The tide is turning American Jews could turn a blind eye to the Occupation, and they did—for forty years—but Gaza, a tipping point, was much more difficult to ignore. American Jews have been forced into rethinking the unthinking, ingrained support of Israel which in turn is loosening the iron grip that AIPAC, the powerful Jewish lobby, has had on Congress and on Jewish institutions in this country. Recently, young Jews came together in New York for a program calledLove, Hate and the Jewish State, sponsored by several leading Jewish organizations, to facilitate discussions about the alienation and pain that Israel’s behavior is causing this younger generation, discussions that arguably will lead many of them to resolve their dilemmas by replacing their Zionism with anti-Zionism, or at least with non-Zionism. Where might these “new” Jews find solidarity if they do make that transition?

Anti-Zionism can produce strange bedfellows. My guests for this Tidings radio program (July 2, 2009) are both Jewish, curiously both with the family name Weiss and both self-described anti-Zionists. They have arrived at this self-description from two radically distinct starting points--one secular and one deeply religious.

Philip Weiss Philip Weiss is a 53-year old New York journalist, author of two books and articles in several leading magazines. For the past three and a half years he has blogged on the Middle East and Jewish identity on Mondoweiss, his increasingly influential blog not least because it provides a gathering place, a safe haven for "secret sharing," for Jews who are struggling with the tension between the image of Israel as a special place for Jews that they grew up with and the image of the militaristic, brutal occupier that Israel increasingly presents to the world.

It is in part a generational tension, a conflict between the tribal elders and the more integrated, assimilated younger generations. What we are seeing is American Jewish identity in transition as the insular, introspective orientation of "What is good for the Jews?" gives way to a more modern, humanistic, international question: "What is good for everyone?"It is a transition that is causing consternation and even panic among the tribal elders, especially within the powerful Israel lobby AIPAC. An interregnum tumult that is complex and often opaque, we are witnessing a reframing of Zionism, the blogsphere alive and unleashed with vitriol and scholarship, as events in Washington and Tel-Aviv are minutely and obsessively observed and analysed, with Mondoweiss and Jewish Peace News invaluable, authoritative sources of such reporting and commentary.It is easier now for American Jews, confused by the conundrum of being a PEP, ("progressive except on Palestine") to find solidarity with others who demand the same human rights for Palestinians as they would for any minority in the United States, or elsewhere in the world. Philip Weiss articulates his own personal role as one that includes responsibility for the Jews and Israelis:

It’s caused a cycle of brutalization…I am able and many Israeli Jews in the United States are able and should display leadership toward Israelis who have no concept of minority rights and no window at all on what they have done to their society…it’s a human rights disaster that they have had the largest power in creating…and they don’t know what to do about it.

I felt some degree of Jewish responsibility (after visiting Gaza) I can work as a writer and work on my country but I also need to work for my people to wake them up to what’s happening.

Rabbi Weiss Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss is a member of the Neturei Karta organization, a world-wide group of deeply orthodox Jews who believe that Zionism is "a terrible stain on Judaism", a corruption of the fundamental tenets of the Jewish religion. I met the rabbi in Brooklyn at a large Palestinian rally. Walking single file into a hall packed with young, educated flag-waving Palestinians, a group of black-garbed, bearded, orthodox Jewish men made a dramatic entry. Intrigued, I approached them to ask why they had come. Was it to support the Palestinians or to demonstrate against them?

Rabbi Weiss told me why his people oppose Zionism, starting with Theodore Herzl and the Zionist movement as rejecting and belittling Judaism, rebelling against God, replacing religion with nationalism and the metaphysical with the material:Further, he explained, it is written that God made the Jews swear three oaths binding them during their exile, all of which have been flouted by Zionism: not to return en masse to the Holy Land, not to rebel against the nations of the world and not to attempt ending the exile, that is returning to Israel, by their own actions, rather than as decreed by God.

Where Phil Weiss' articulates his secular mission as helping Israelis by "waking them up to what's happening", the deeply orthodox religion solution from Neturei Karta, as told to me by Rabbi Weiss, is contrition and restitution:

Being that the land of Palestine was inhabited, you’re going to destroy those people, destroy their lives… This in itself, the Torah says you’re not allowed to steal even half a penny from another human being. This flies in the face of the Torah. Every concept of the Torah gets breached by stealing this land from the Palestinian people.

What does the Rabbi want Israel to do?

It has to be one state but the speedy and total dismantlement, total dissolution of the state of Israel... The course is to approach the leadership of the Palestinian people, whoever their leaders are, to profusely apologize for the wrongs done to them, to work on a course of restitution of paying back the damages, returning the property and the houses, and ask them humbly if they would allow the Jewish people to live among them.

If Zionism is the problem, then any solution will require a profound reframing of the proposition that is Israel. Who is up to this task?

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Zionism Under Attack is also available as a podcast. In the radio series Tidings from Hazel Kahan, it was produced by Tony Ernst and broadcast on WPKN on July 2, 2009 Tidings can be heard streaming live on the first Thursday of every month at 12 noon EST on WPKN.org, broadcasting from 89.5 Bridgeport, CT and WPKM 88.7 Montauk, NY. WPKN is an entirely listener-supported community radio station. Hazel Kahan is also the creator of leafages.

HEALTHCARE IS A HUMAN RIGHTS ISSUE

An interview with Dr. Sara Bhattacharjee

Dr. Sara Bhattacharjee in her office

In February, 2009, after a delicious traditional 4-rice South Indian lunch in her office, I interviewed Dr. Sara Bhattacharjee, a primary care and community medicine practitioner at Christian Medical College in Vellore, Tamil Nadu state.

Four-rice traditional South Indian lunch

Until I saw her philosophy in action in the hospital, slums and villages around Vellore, I assumed that our first world country had invaluable advice and example to offer this (emerging? not-first world?) country. How quickly I shed those assumptions!

Grounds of Christian Medical College

Instead, I learned was that by viewing health care as a human rights issue and bringing unpaid volunteers into crucial nodes of a human network, the community itself can be transformed into an enlivened, active, effective organism in which the hospital is far more than a building populated by sick people and white-coated stethoscopes:

Shrine on hospital grounds

As Dr. Sara sees it:“Hospitals need to be seen not as worlds in themselves but as part of the community’s resource for the treatment of illness or the promotion of health,” to be educated so they know what is happening to themselves, to seek out solutions, to show them they have access they didn’t know they had.

Entrance to Low Cost Effective Care Unit

At the heart of Dr. Sara’s Low Cost Effective Care Unit are her volunteers, a small but committed group of nine women, who for the past six years have catapulted their training to enabled the disabled to self-identify their needs into expanding their own skills, initiative and self-worth so that they are now crucial members of

Volunteers and outpatients at village clinic

the community, respected 'go-to' leaders who have raised the community’s sense of self-worth and knowledge, along with their own. Dr. Sara describes it as a dynamic process that keeps giving--at the individual and community levels:

“(After the training)the volunteers were there with knowledge and skill and we thought if there were people there with knowledge and skill and good attitude, perhaps things would happen in the community. What we have found is that these volunteers are wonderful people and the knowledge and skills they have gained they have multiplied and used many times over. They’ve been very innovative in looking around in their own areas and finding resources they could use...even if they’re doing other things...they’re all keen to still get together and come together for monthly meetings and all this is totally voluntary because we don’t really pay them anything. I think it has made a change in all their lives...all of them say: ‘I’ve always wanted to serve, to help people, I always had a mind to serve but I didn’t know what to do. Now I’ve been empowered so when I’m asked I know what to do or at least I’m able to think about what to do’. I think the more they do,
the more they become innovative."

Government-provided wheelchair for paraplegic villager

In one remarkable story, Dr. Sara talks about teenage boys who, when one of their group was diagnosed with cancer, became anxious that they would also get the disease. They approached a volunteer (and, as Dr.Sara put it, “it speaks volumes for the volunteer that they felt they could go to her”) who approached Dr. Sara's team who identified the real anxieties underlying the cancer fears: typical teenage fears about HIV, sex, drinking, drugs or masturbation. The team created a life skills program for the boys who in turn initiated a garbage-cleanup program which led to contact with their elected representative and their subsequent civic empowerment.

The volunteer then asked Dr. Sara: "What about the girls? What can we do for then?" which led to teenage girls creating a program for the isolated elders of the community which in turn led to ongoing bonding of these two groups, the community's underlying network now richer and strengthened, as resilience, generosity and innovation rewarded and multiplied--living proof of what a difference a single volunteer can make in the lives of other and how this becomes amplified when several like-minded women connect to each other for shared purpose, when, as Dr. Sara puts it, "(it creates) a way of working that chimes with the forces of life that exist within the community...Our experience has been that these volunteers have been able to get young people to come together, young people to help them with whatever they do,” to start what has grown into a youth movement in the community.

Painted glass window in hospital hallway

I remind myself that we are in India, talking about slums and very poor rural people where funds are scarce and where poverty does not conflict with human goodness. What a far cry from our society’s flawed concept of
our society's health care!

She explains the difference between community and family medicine: “Community medicine involves a little more focus on health within the community whereas family medicine is focused much more on the individual but sees the individual very much in relation to where they come from; their particular environment is very important to the treatment of disease. She has her young interns spend a week visiting their outpatients at their homes in the slums and villages after which they return “gobsmacked” by what they witnessed, saying they would otherwise have had never known “that this is the condition in which this person lives.”

Temple detail in village center

I am beginning to understand what Dr. Sara means when she writes about the holistic integration “of the biological and clinical, socio-economic and behavioral, emotional and spiritual aspects of life.” Her stories reveal just how personalized this approach is, in which: “the individual is valued, the family history is known, the patient is involved in making decisions and the relationship between that individual and the staff is one of trust and friendship...In our outreach work we’ve gone beyond just the typical family medicine approach...We’ve seen enormous amounts of generosity, people helping each other in the midst of violence and chaos...we see a force and a resilience among people who are actually facing very great odds against life itself...we feel that we are not the keepers of health and life, it has to be in the hands of people but we can encourage, lift up, support, if we are sensitive...being aware, to feel it.”

Government-provided house to paraplegic villager (cost Rs. 37,000/-)

All this in India, among the poorest of the poor where, as it is with plant and man-made materials nothing is wasted: every encounter is examined for what it teaches, where choices are not made between "either/or" but seen instead as "both/and", where nothing is discarded and everything holds possibility in another time frame, if not this one. This means that sometimes results may not become visible for years and that patience and being intensely present supplant the demand for immediate gratification.

Wonderful inspiring stories but I still didn’t understand how all the elements come together in what felt to me a magical, mystical way, beyond simply the result of enlightened, patient leadership. How does it actually happen?

This is what Dr. Sara told me: “I look at it like this: people are in webs of relationship and sometimes we don’t know where we are and who is connected to us and suddenly it all lights up and people hold hands and it may light up and it may fade away and somehow you find another network...there are people who in themselves are saying I want to help somebody or I want to make life better for myself and others but I don’t know what to do and suddenly across their path comes this volunteer or somebody from the hospital and they say ‘ok we’ll join into that’..or they say ‘we have this problem, can you help us?’ Certainly it’s not one way. I have, and sometimes my team has, gained more than we have given.”

Dr. Binayak Sen

As we ended our conversation, Dr. Sara told me about her friend and colleague, the physician-activist Dr. Binayak Sen, whose work with mineworkers and tribal people displaced by the building of dams in Chattisgarh led him “to stand up and speak for the rights of people, not just for health but to look at health as a human right and approach health from the human rights perspective.” Using nonviolence, discussion and writing, Dr. Sen was openly critical of the government, who labeled him as Naxalite and put him in jail where he has been since May 14, 2007. His arrest has sparked worldwide condemnation and protest.

Does it make sense to think of the giving of health care as a human right too?

UPDATE!
On May 25, Binayak Sen was granted bail and released after spending two years in jail.

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This interview, broadcast on Tidings from Hazel Kahan on May 9, 2009 on WPKN 89.5 Bridgeport and 88.7 fm Montauk, is available as a half-hour podcast. Tidings from Hazel Kahan is produced by Tony Ernst.

MAKING SENSE OF A WORLD IN CRISIS

Recordings of this series of interviews, broadcast on Tidings from Hazel Kahan in February and March, 2009 on WPKN 89.5 Bridgeport and 88.7 fm Montauk, are available as half-hour podcasts. Tidings from Hazel Kahan is produced by Tony Ernst.

In this three-part radio interview series, I asked four leading thinkers to talk about their views on the monumental changes gripping our world--the tumult, the shifting, the fall of hallowed institutions-- and what they believe the future holds.

In the first program, I had two conversations—the first with John Daido Loori, current abbot of the Zen Mountain Monastery in upstate New York, who analyses our current global crisis from a Zen Buddhist perspective. The second conversation was with Peter Russell, a writer and speaker who examines the tumult and crisis of our world in terms of our belief systems and the part that a developed consciousness can play in liberating our minds.

In the second program, Andrew Harvey, a well known and distinguished mystic and scholar, a poet and a novelist, a translator of Rumi and, as architect of Sacred Activism and the Institute of Sacred Activism, a spiritual teacher and writer. He talks about the global crisis and the choices we face between, he says, suicide and transformation.

In the third and last part of this series, you will hear my conversation with Dr. Michael Conforti, a Jungian analyst, author and founder of the Assisi Institute, who uses the theories of Carl Jung to develop his Archetypal Pattern Analysis in which he provides what he calls ‘a meaningful confluence between science, spirituality and psychology’. Using these lens, he shares with us his views of the crisis in our world.

For greater understanding about who these thinkers are and if you'd like to contact them directly, please visit their web sites.

What makes an activist?

Summary based on a Tidings from Hazel Kahan program first heard on WPKN on January 1, 2009.

Lately, I’ve been curious about why some people become activists while others look on from the sidelines, unmoved by situations that a committed activist finds intolerable.

We’re all against oppression and injustice and we all believe human rights are hugely important and must be defended at all cost—but not necessarily by us.. Others however hear a call that the rest of us don’t and they respond, believing that their presence is required elsewhere, sometimes on foreign soil. Somehow it’s the ‘foreign soil’ part that seems of particular significance to me. What makes such people different from you and me? Are they fearless? Grandiose? Risk-takers? Adventure seekers? Or is it something more personal? More in touch with their conscience? Perhaps they have less to lose back home? Do we each have a tipping point?

For Bill McNulty, well-known for his non-violent civil disobedience opposition to the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia for which he served six months in federal prison, activism has been a progression as he came to understand that it’s is a lonely quest without the camaraderie, support and learning of community.

You never know when somebody will take the next step, increase the risk he or she is willing to take. Bill relates the story he heard first from Daniel Berrigan, the poet, activist and Roman Catholic priest whose voice and actions spearheaded the Vietnam anti-war movement:

"A river runs through a village and everyday bodies float down stream. The villagers are good people and they remove the bodies, healing those who are still alive, burying the corpses. One day, one villager realizes this is not enough. He goes to the head of the river, the place where the bodies come from, where the people who create the policy reside, where the brutality originates. The closer you get to that place, the more intense the experience becomes.”

Going to the head of the river, the place where the bodies come from, where the risk is greatest. It’s a powerful image and an apt description of the work done by IWPS, the International Women’s Peace Service in the occupied West Bank. Located in the village of Haris in the Salfit region, their regularly emailed Human Rights Reports provide witness accounts of Israeli violations and abuses. So far, they have produced 391 reports.

Why do these women activists do it? “A concern about human rights and the rule of international law,” one of them told me. Sometimes it’s risky, sometimes it’s scary but it’s also “a deep experience”: daily life in a Palestinian village, experiencing the Palestinian people and their legendary hospitality and strength, experiencing the Occupation, “being able to contribute toward solidarity with Palestinian people...peace and reconciliation in the Middle East,” experiences that “helps to do solidarity work in our own countries.”

Expressing a truly global perspective, one of the IWPS volunteers told me: “I think we as Europeans have responsibility in trying to solve the problem because we contributed to it. Besides," she added, "carrying the story beyond Palestine’s borders and the reporting by traditional media provides is also important."

So much commitment and yet no certainty that any of it will end up making a difference. The women at IWPS report not only no visible progress in the region but actual deterioration as the occupation becomes increasingly entrenched and institutionalized. Bill McNulty adds the perspective of a veteran activist: “I realize that no matter what you do, you do good because it is good. You’re not necessarily called on to be effective but to be faithful to the principles that govern what you do. You will lose friends in the process,” he warns “because you will be outside of the box of conventional wisdom.”

My friend Eleanor, who has volunteered in South America, Thailand and Burma tells me that having witnessed injustice and suffering first-hand, she must continue telling the story: “If you see it and do nothing, it’s such disrespect. They gave you their story and you have to honor them and look for ways to keep it alive.”

Perhaps that’s what it is then: motivated not by success but by conscience, activists are people of conscience and consciousness who, knowing what they know, have no alternative but to do what they do. Perhaps we’re all at different stages of that progression.

A podcast of these interviews is available on Tidings from Hazel Kahan. Tidings, produced by Tony Ernst, can be heard on the first Thursday of every month on WPKN 89.5 Bridgeport, WPKM 88.7 Montauk and wpkn.org.

Dark tourism--a good or a bad thing?

What is it and who are the dark tourists?

It seems that we humans are hardwired to leave our hearths and homes every now and then to discover what else lies beyond the horizon. So we turn into tourists or travelers, timid or intrepid, hewing to the known or smitten by the uncharted, more or less conscious of what we are seeing as we go. Perhaps the repetitive pressure of much contemporary life has stimulated our appetites for the authentic and the spectacular, allowing the emergence of a new genre-- dark tourism and the dark tourist, motivated by death and disaster and apocalypse rather than by sun and sea and sand and pastoral living, with even ecotourism and adventure travel no longer stimulating enough.

I came across the concept of dark tourism through Amanda Kendle, a travel writer for vagabondish, an Australia-based on-line travel zine and on her own blog,
I called her in Perth, Western Australia and she told me about grief tourism (the Paris tunnel where Diana died, Auschwitz, Pompeii, Ground Zero), disaster tourism (post-tsunami Thailand, post-Katrina New Orleans) doomsday tourism (Anarctic, Great Barrier Reef, rainforests) and, what I was most interested in, poverty tourism or ‘poorism’ (Soweto, flavelas of Brazil, slums of Mumbai and Delhi).

Some varieties of dark tourism focus on people, others on places; some focus on man-made, some on natural cataclysms; some are about living people, others about historical or recently dead people. (Dark tourism has captured the interest of academics, including at least one doctoral candidate.

Eco-tourism--dark or light?
On the face of it, eco-tourism is not dark at all but very much about the living, defined buy the Ecotourism Society as "responsible travel to natural areas which conserves the environment and improves the welfare of the local people". I include it here because it shares ethical issues with dark tourism and because some of its consequences could be very dark indeed.

Ten or so years ago I was an eco-tourist.

How noble and green and enlightened and adventurous of me, I thought, traveling to Ecuador’s rainforest and the Amazon to see nature under attack so that when I returned to New York City I could report on the fragility of it all, the poverty but also report on the wisdom of the jungle people. I would become an advocate and persuade others to go see for themselves and the world would then be a better place.

Wrong! Do not go, is what I would say now. Keep your feet and your footprints right here at home. Look at photographs others have brought back and listen to their stories. Support the efforts of the rain forest custodians or the Galapagos or the Alaskan wilderness by donating money but don’t add your presence—and the carbon footprints it will take to get there. Leave yourself at home. Let the native people and the flora and fauna be. It’s the enlightened thing to do.
But this is now and I’m talking about then. I joined a dozen or so other people on a trip offered by a New Age organization in New York City. It was the first group trip I had ever signed on for and, so far, it has also been my last. A well-known leader was going to lead us into the rain forest where we would stay with indigenous people, visit shamans, learn about the healing powers of plants and trees, do psycho-navigation, drumming and shape-shifting and, an implicit promise not verbalized in the brochure, we would be able to sample the ayahuasca drug in a country where the long arm of US law could never reach us.

Ecuador Diary
Here’s what my diary pages have to tell about one of my days as an eco-tourist:
We walked for about four hours ending up at the house of a shaman in a clearing by the river. The people were making a hammock out of palm trees and making yarn from the young leaves. It was very hot, no noonday covering. We sat around, I drained my canteen and then some of our New Age-niks went shopping. To my chagrin and deep shame, they bought the hammock, the stools and anything else that was movable. One woman walked around in her bra, another took off her jeans, as if they were in a Sheraton resort. The Indians, evangelized by the missionaries, are a very modest, prim people.
I discussed my feelings with one of the women, trying to make sense out of the fact that we were supposed to be on a spiritual journey, to learn from the Indians and instead, here we were, raping their homes, escalating their sense of materialism, shopping their homes, for God’s sake. The Jungle Mall. Nobody was interested in learning how they used certain parts of the palm tree for the hammock and others for brooms or baskets. The rush to buy continued when we went to another house to see their pottery and then went on unrestrained at the back of the settlement where we slept. Eventually the shaman intervened as what was left of headdresses, bowls, baskets, stools were being traded for sleeping bags, money, mosquito repellent, flashlights, watches and money.

If you were to ask D. (our Ecuadoran leader) why he encourages this crass behavior from his group, he would say he is trying to show them that ecotourism is profitable and that they need the money. He is on their side and doesn’t really care what we do or how we demean ourselves.

The ethics of it all
What are the ethics of offering misfortune as a commodity for sale, of paying to see poverty, of objectifying slum-dwellers and street children. not necessarily with an intent of remedying their condition? Is paying to see glue-sniffing street kids in the slums of Delhi any different from paying to see animals in the zoo? Is the “otherness” of the animals different from the otherness of the children? If you were such a child would you have any way of understanding why Western tourists come to look at you, snapping pictures and talking to each other about you? Surely there’s something slightly perverse in spending vacation time observing profound misery.

It’s not like that at all, says Chris Way, owner with his partner Krishna Poojari of Reality Tours and Travel in Mumbai. (I interviewed him in Mumbai a few hours before the attacks began on November 26.) Reality Tours who offer what they call slum tours of Dharavi, reportedly the largest slum in Asia, see it quite differently. Their objective is to counteract the negative image of slum dwellers by showing their productive and energetic sides along with their sense of community. Out of respect for the inhabitants, tours are small, no more than six people and photography is not allowed. Reality Tours and Travel also return some of the profits to the community. You can hear Chris Way point to a lack of understanding that leads journalists and others to condemn slum tourism.

Too complex for too many conclusions
It’s a complex subject and, altruism and greater good or not, it raises many provocative questions about voyeurism and exploitation. Perhaps it all boils down to intention: if you pay to go on a slum tour, what is it you expect to see and why? Will you be disappointed and feel you didn’t get your money’s worth if the slum dwellers are not as desperate or hungry or poor or dysfunctional as you’d expected? Do you wonder if the glue-sniffing children in the Brazilian favelas were instructed to play up their glue sniffing when the tourists come around? Do you wonder what would happen to the poorism business if poverty were eradicated one fine day?

Dark questions. Appropriate for dark tourism.

Perhaps that is where we draw the bright line—at intention and consciousness. And nobody knows your intention better than you. Perhaps paradoxically dark tourism contains its own light, the light of enlightenment. Know thyself and understand what it is that draws you to the dark side. And once there, understand what your actions may lead to. Whether you’re being perverse, morbid or a seeker of truth and knowledge—it’s all ok when consciousness makes it so.
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(Dec. 20: Just came across this blog post about 'weird tourism'.)

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Dark Tourism is also available as a podcast. In the radio series Tidings from Hazel Kahan, it was produced by Tony Ernst and broadcast on WPKN on December 4, 2008. Tidings can be heard streaming live on the first Thursday of every month at noo WPKN.org, broadcasting from 89.5 Bridgeport, CT and WPKM 88.7 Montauk, NY. WPKN is an entirely listener-supported community radio station. Hazel Kahan is also the creator of leafages.

BEGGING AND BEGGARS

Begging: a profession? a misfortune? a job? a scourge? a spiritual practice? an industry? a stain on society? freedom of choice?

Like tipping, the subject of my previous post, begging creates an unequal relationship between giver and receiver, an unbalanced one-way exchange with the amount of money transferred depending on the generosity and intentions of the donor with the receiver having very little to say.

Because I was born in India and spent my formative years there, begging was a normal part of my environment, when I used to go to the market with my mother or to the Anarkali bazaar with my father. I saw beggars every day, and although I found them annoying, I would always stare at those with especially startling deformities such as grotesquely twisted limbs or too many fingers or tiny microencephalitic heads, I did not feel responsible for their misfortune nor did I think I could--or should--improve their futures.

Sometimes, against my mother’s wishes I would hand out coins, knowing that this would embolden other beggars to run towards me, extending their hands and whining ‘paisa, memsahib’ but by then I felt I had done my good deed for the day and could convincingly wave my empty hands or pockets to demonstrate I had nothing left to give. These are my memories as a seven- or eight-year old child but their enduring clarity has left me curious to hear the stories brought back by American visitors to India to hear how they react to the poverty in general and beggars in particular often a defining part of their experience. Of course beggars are not restricted to India but are found in virtually every country of our planet.

I am also most curious about what it’s like to be a beggar, who becomes one and who remains one and how beggars and begging fit into Indian society today. Do the beggars of Mumbai or New Delhi have anything in common with the homeless of New York City?

That’s the thing with the subjects I choose for Tidings. Before I know it I’m burrowing around in some unexpectedly deep, complex, mysterious, weird corner of the universe. Begging has always been with us and probably always will be. It may even compete for primacy with the world’s other oldest profession. Yes, begging is considered a profession, not only by many of those who practice it but by academic researchers too. A blogger from Ghana describes begging as “one of the fastest growing sectors of the country’s economy”. That pronouncement certainly gave me pause—perhaps it’s time to rethink begging! Should I be gloomily realistic and propose that with the economy being what it is these days we may want to consider begging as a viable emerging career alternative? If not on the streets, then at least to join the swarms of beggars on the Internet here and here.

The way people feel about beggars seems to go broaden the more they’ve been exposed to begging in their lives. On first contact, they take it very personally, almost as if they themselves are the victims. They experience confusion and fear, especially when confronted and surrounded by a number of clamoring beggars in a crowded Indian city. Greater exposure to beggars over time leads to self-analysis: people ask what is my contemptuous, fearful rejection of beggars doing to me and my soul?

Amy teaches high school math in New Jersey and has a rather pragmatic attitude towards beggars. She says she feels no obligation to give money to either beggars in India or to the homeless in New York City. Compassion, yes and food or small useful gifts perhaps, but not money and then only to adult women not children. Unsure of where the money will end up, she feels giving money will only perpetuate the problem.

Isabella, a high school senior from Long Island, New York, describes her first visit to India a year ago, when she was 17. She struggles with what the right thing to do is, unsure whether giving to a beggar is a good thing or a bad thing. “I really don’t know”, is her heartfelt conclusion. Perhaps, if they were were honest, this would also be the conclusion of broader philosophical and public policy debates about poverty and its solutions in think tanks and NGOs around the world.

I wondered if maybe one gets used to beggars and develops a more resigned attitude over time so I emailed Midge, a school chum from the days we both went to Woodstock School, Mussoorie, U.P. Being an old India hand, born and raised there and currently on sabbatical in Bangalore, I thought she might have a well-developed philosophy about how she and her husband Byron behave when beggars come up to them, asking for money. Midge is troubled by how easy it is to transform beggars into “The Other”, ignoring their presence and thereby denying their existence rather than confronting them and acknowledging them as fellow human beings. Whatever we give beggars, she says, we know is ‘totally inadequate to solve their problems’ We can’t help them and so we feel “like a rat”, no matter what we do.

Another friend, Milda, had visited the holy city of Vanarsi on the Ganges River where her terrifying experiences with beggars have left her not just with vivid memories but also with new resolve: She tells me: “If I would go back...I would go back with a different mind set. It is I who failed the poor...not they who failed me. I was not prepared. And I should have been.”

However heartfelt these Western views are, they do not begin to chronicle the many-tentacled position that begging actually occupies in the narrative of Indian culture and history. For a more nuanced understanding I interviewed two native-born Indians.

I spoke with Mr. S. Swaminathan, or Swami as he asked me to call him, in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, where he conducts motivational and communication workshops. I had came across his satirical article
in which his purpose was to reframe beggars as people with professional skills: they understand site selection, for example, by choosing the right place and the right time, they are skilled at “practicing the art of sustained irritation until the alms giver breaks down and puts money in the begging bowl”. They also know how to network to identify clients and learn the latest techniques, from their colleagues, all skills that could be applied to more productive ends. Begging is not a choice, he insists and demands that politicians and society accept responsibility by creating dignity for beggars through viable jobs. “Instead of patronizing the beggar”, he says, “persuade the politicians!”

I also stumbled across what its editor, Vikas Kamat, claims is the largest personal blog on the web, citing not only its 4 or 5 million page views a month but also the more than 100 person-years it represents of stories, commentaries and photographs from his India-based family . In an article written by his father before his death and translated by Vikas, we learn about the varieties of begging, ranging from inherited tradition to the temporary and circumstantial to the professional with their sharply defined and defended territorial claims. I urge you to visit this site for a fascinating and illustrated tour through the complexities of begging in India.

When we talked, Vikas explained that donors need beggars, to allow them to learn and practice humility and to provide them “a fast track to heaven” to earn punya or divine credits, sort of like the Jewish concept of mitzvah. In other words, the beggar-donor relationship is symbiotic, with a spiritual rationale, not merely a transfer of money from one person to another. Hindu ritual includes learning how to beg on entering the monkhood or taking a vow to beg for, say, one day a week as an exercise in humility. To become a successful beggar requires many skills and props, including acting, performance, storytelling, wardrobe design, training and outfitting of animals with their decorative dress. (The two black-and-white photos were taken at my parents' house a long time ago: they had brought in a monkey wallah to perform at their grandson's birthday party.)

Looking at a beggar’s life from the inside like this makes it appear suddenly colorful and a lot less drab, almost enviable, at least for a short stint.

Beggars are not doing nearly as well as they once did, however. Since the halcyon days and “due to an increase in mankind’s selfishness and small-mindedness, (the beggar community) feels they are not able to make a living”. Another factor is the institutionalization of government departments designed to eliminate or relocate beggar communities, not a good omen if you’re thinking about begging as a career track should the Apocalypse appear more imminent. But then there’s always the Internet!

I wanted to know how Vikas, as an Indian, thinks about those visitors to his country who are overwhelmed and horrified by the beggars and the poverty they witness? Agreeing over cultures, continents and generations with Isabella, he tells me there is no binary answer. It’s part of life, part of India, something he grew up with but also a sensitive, controversial subject--and a dilemma. Patronizing beggars keeps the profession alive but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be able to depend on our fellow humans when in need.

Whatever their personal attitudes to begging are, everyone I spoke to agrees that supporting beggars does little to help them and only adds to the social problem. If we want a beggar-free world as it is today, skill training and job creation must replace the tin cup as income and the street as home. Poverty is the cause and beggars are the effect. The question then become how to replace all those good karma chips and place-in-heaven tokens and all that soft-hearted guilt with tough love. I have another contrarian question: in a democracy, which India is, don’t beggars have a right to choose their profession? What gives us the right to take it away from them or to relocate them out of sight so they won’t offend the tourists?

After our interview, Vikas Kamat continued our discussion on his blog.

Begging and Beggars is also available as a podcast. In the radio series Tidings from Hazel Kahan, it was produced by Tony Ernst and broadcast on WPKN on October 23, 2008.