I had the honour and pleasure of meeting Santosh Desai recently. He is one of India’s foremost account planners and a weekly columnist (typically in the role of a commentator on popular culture) for the Times of India. Chatting with him was uplifting for he is eloquent, down-to-earth, and has integrity. It gives me great hope that people like him (those with a holistic bent of mind) have a voice in advertising and media in India.
Here is one of his columns from the TOI. I think it nicely demonstrates how his unique brand of acute observation, unapologetic introspection, and nuanced articulation might generate deep insights in to why we feel and do the things we feel and do. (How this sort of thinking might be relevant to understanding consumer behavior is perhaps easy to see, but more on it later.)
THE FEAR OF GIVING
Old ladies begging in winter nights get me. I am always shaken, disturbed and moved in a way that goes beyond sympathy or pity. It seems colossally unfair that one should be so vulnerable, so shrivelled by penury at this stage of one’s life. Of course the sight of poverty always induces guilt pangs, the homeless make one uncomfortable, the idea of street children failing to find avenues to channelise their obvious energies is difficult to live with but, for some reason, the idea of old ladies in winter wearing smudged glasses held up by strings has the most powerful emotional impact on me. And yet, for all the trauma this sight induces in me, I find it impossible to actually reach into my pocket and give her anything.
I think about it with increasing desperation and then the light turns green and I am free to go. I dream of making a grand gesture, of emptying out my pockets on an impulse or going round the city distributing blankets but of course I do nothing. And I don’t think I am alone in this. While a large part of our attitude towards the economically underprivileged is made up of indifference, there is a small but significant part that is unable to take the step from concern to giving. What explains this inability, this paralysis that stymies good intentions?
And I am not talking about the rational arguments against giving charity to people who beg on the streets. There are those argue that begging is a nuisance and giving only encourages dependence. You frequently hear accounts of how when meaningful work was offered to the people who were begging, it was almost always turned down. Without getting into the argument for or against encouraging begging, let us focus instead on those situations when we have no conceptual problems with giving something but find ourselves unable to bring ourselves to do so.
Perhaps, what prevents us from giving is that it appears to be a cheap way to buy absolution. It seems too easy, to rid oneself of guilt by offloading some money into an outstretched hand. Are we merely purchasing a cheap ticket to heaven, finding a way to postpone facing up to some deep sense of guilt at our relative good fortune?
The other possible reason is that the problem seems too vast for one small gesture to make any real difference. The sense of “so what will it really change’’ might stop us from taking that small step.
The enormity of the problem mocks at the futility of our gesture and makes it appear to be an act of indulgence aimed at making us, rather than the person begging, feel better. The feeling that there is no symbolic way of shouldering responsibility, that once we cross the threshold and take any action then we somehow become responsible for the problem in its entirety. And if we are not ready for that, then it is perhaps better to do nothing at all.
In some deep-rooted way, we are afraid of playing God with other people’s destinies. The act of giving seems laden with arrogance; we attribute superiority to ourselves based on material comfort and somehow this feels wrong. It feels wrong that one should be in a position to make such a difference to someone else’s life.
The transaction is too naked, the difference too palpable for comfort. Also, there is this other problem with playing God—we need to be completely fair and impartial.
Who is to say who needs our charity the most—is it the shrivelled old woman or the urchin without a leg? Do we give on the basis of an internal pathos-meter that measures the relative direness of the need? Do we then end up summing up human beings by the size of their afflictions?
And hence the irony of doing nothing for those in need not out of callousness, but out of some form of respect for them as people.
Perhaps this too is only a way to rationalise indifference. Perhaps this whole debate is too self-indulgent in the first place. And it certainly changes nothing.
The next time an old lady raps on my car window, I will still be a deer in her headlights, trapped between my fear of arrogance and a need to do something.
