A new innovation is transforming many lives in the villages of India by bringing light 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 inspired me to think about giving in a different way leading me to ask myself, “what is the most effective form of giving?” Is it education, commercial activity or disaster relief? There are so many ways to make a difference. One way of giving can seem more effective or sustainable than other ways depending on the way it is expressed, looked at or implemented.
I then came to define there were eight parts to giving as a way to look at this. So, let me map out the eight distinctions; which in effect are often ’stages’ of giving as well.
Phase one: Exigency – salvaging and helping others who are suffering due to natural calamities, epidemic diseases or other insurmountable problems.
Phase two: Respite – providing respite from enduring need, poverty, ill-health, disadvantages or prejudice which otherwise would continue or deteriorate because of the lack of awareness, training or resources.
Stage three: Healing and protection – mentally, physically and emotionally. Many people carry traumas that may be invisible but severely limiting their lives. Giving the healing to release the deep-rooted pain creates more opportunities for them while giving suitable protection gives them a sense of security.
Phase four: Edification – giving better edification, awareness and skill imparting to create empowered and innovative solutions to generating resources while helping people to discover their exclusive talent to succeed.
Stage five: Inspired investment – giving a help, capital or resources to those who have great talent to alter the situation. This gets used many times as the resources become more and passed on to other people who again produce more out of the prospects given.
Phase six: Maintainability – working collectively involving the people in the local surroundings, creating maintainable society – ecologically and communally.
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 find is that at each of these eight stages of giving there are different things that the giver receives.
One: Sense of bonding
Two: Sense of well being
Three: Relief from pain (our own)
Four: Gratitude for our own knowledge, skills and circumstances
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 gratifying encouragement and devotion 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 lucky to have an experience early in 2008 while journeying with a group of devoted entrepreneurs across India to see how we could be more productive in our helping. I was particularly happy to have one outstanding encounter that led me to think about what ‘actual giving’ really meant.
We were travelling in a small town one day. Four of us had just called a taxi to take us to another nearby town. We dealt with the driver cautiously as our hotel staff had forewarned us about the possible swindle when they see that 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 patted him on the back for having an affectionate family and told him that I also had two kids of the same age as his. When the others came back the driver instantly asked us to come to his house for food. I thought it was just a formality he wanted to convey at first. However, after leaving us at the centre of the town, he was particular that he would wait for us till we were done with our traveling around the town. And he actually did. I was in fact quite taken aback to see him still standing by the side of the road next to his taxi even after an hour. We hopped back into the taxi and he whizzed off up the road to where his home was.
When we arrived we were actually quite shocked to see how he was living. It was almost like the same condition (if not worse) to the lifestyle of people living in slums we had visited previously. From the nice new taxi he was driving, who could have imagined
As he reached the narrow open street in between shanties that were made with rough concrete blocks and mud walls, we felt guilty about accepting his invitation. For a brief moment I was nonplussed. “How could I accept the hospitality of this man who didn’t seem to have anything at all and I didn’t even bring any gift that could be a help to his family”, I told myself.
As we went inside his house, we saw a vessel and a small stove on the floor. His timid young wife raised her head in surprise and withdrew into the small store room (a cupboard size) adjacent to it. As I took in the scene, I saw the neighbours residing next door giving her a few cups across the broken down concrete fence. The young couple did not even have sufficient teacups in their house. There was a single room fitted with one single bed and a pretty old galvanised box near 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.
Steaming cups of tea and hot snacks arrived soon. Both his kids as well as kids from the neighbouring houses came to see us and remained at the doorway. The six of us could just squeeze into the tiny room. I was curious to know where his children were sleeping. I thought maybe they had another space somewhere. To my astonishment, he just pointed at the chest and said with his happy smile that it was their bed.
He happily told us that he was an amateur dancer in the town and showed us some plaques on the sill above the bed. Enthusiastic to show us his dancing proficiency, he ran outside all at once. From somewhere music came flowing into the tiny room. He had no apparatus for music within the house, it was coming from outside. Surprised, I looked around to see him reversing his vehicle towards the back of his house keeping the doors open with the radio of the car blaring forth!
The time moved fast (with his dancing and the many more cups of tea that followed) and very soon it was time to thank them for their great warmth and courtesy and make our move. As we got ready to leave and express our gratitude to him and his wife, he pulled out the best of all the rugs he had, and just gave it to us. It was one of the very few things he owned. It was impossible to believe that he was offering 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 awe-inspiring experience after a few days, I considered our begging off his gift. He looked crest-fallen that we didn’t accept the gift. It wasn’t only the rejecting of the gift that remained in my mind.
I realised that the sense of discomfort I felt was actually coming from perceiving him as less fortunate. I was thinking that I couldn’t possibly take anything from someone who had so little.
But did he really have so little? Maybe he had more – a lot more.
Maybe the real present we could have given him then was to receive his present in utmost deference and thankfulness.
All actions of gifting and getting are essential for us to fill our world with plenty and contentment equally for both giver and getter. We can begin doing this instead of assessing and defending one over the other. The perfect act of gifting and getting needs no further clarification.
Manoj Sinha’s words echo in my mind once again, “these are customers, not victims.” I can imagine the smiling faces of the villagers who are now proud to have electricity in their villages and the children who now can read books and learn in their homes at night.
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