Beggars Can Be Choosers

The Telegraph recently had an interesting article on beggars who are also money lenders to small traders. Apparently, the average beggar (without special deformities etc.) earns between 8 and 10 K per month.

Of course, since they can’t be seen to have any conspicuous consumption, they save most of their earnings and are tremendously cash rich. A beggar who drowned in the Hoogly recently left behind a “potli” on the banks. This bundle of cloth had Rs 75000 tied in it!

This kind of access to cash that they cannot be seen to have and that they cannot bank makes the beggars happily lend to the grocers and the fish-wallahs and the train-line candy-sellers at 6% interest, which suits both the lender and the borrower.

Begging, of course, is a time-honoured Indian tradition. Our Brahmins were only supposed to eat what they received in alms every day. Of course, in true Brahmin style, they made it a sin to turn a Brahmin away from your door (leading, eventually to the Ram-Ravan debacle) and made you feed them only the best. You had to feed a Brahmin at births and weddings and deaths and at all the other in-between festivals and occasions. But I digress.



Back to beggars, then. We grew up with some bizaare Urban Legends of begging. The big ones, of course, are the organized gangs that maim and blind (Slumdog Millionaire ishtyle). These are the real Gabbar stories our moms scared us with night when we couldn’t sleep and didn’t want to listen to them!

Not your mom? Well, mine has a strong sense of the macabre that has been honed to perfection after years of addiction to those lurid Hindi magazines that have been exposing the truth behind great supernatural and heinous crimes long before the television news channels. Her latest accumulation of the Urban Begging Legend is the story where the nanny “loans” out her “happy, healthy, milk-white” charge to professional beggars for an hourly fee. So when the parents are at work in their call-centres and BPOs the kids are at work in beggars’ arms. Talk about going to work young!

It’s true though, that when we were kids, the beggars with infants in their arms were more authentic looking. They looked more miserable, their babies looked more emaciated and undernourished and lethargic. There’s this woman on Camac Street now who has a beautiful, alert, kohl-eyed baby who’s obviously so well-fed he won’t even cry or look sad. He chuckles back at you when you smile. This woman carries a clean, brand new but empty feeding bottle in her free hand and begs for money to buy milk for the child.

The first time she came to me when I was driving to work, I opened the passenger door and asked her to sit. I said I’d take her to the mithai-store around the corner and buy her some milk. I said I’d do it every day if she fed the kid in front of me.

She disappeared. She’s still on Camac Street most days but she now keeps a wary eye out for my car and makes sure she doesn’t approach me.

From Madness to Mental Illness

image: avsar-deeds.blogspot.com

I’ve been revisiting Foucault’s History of Madness and it has started off a thought process within me that, I think, is long overdue and was just waiting for a push.

As I look again at the journey of what I see as alternative states of mental (st)ability, the stagnation of more than a century of rut-thought is offensive. It is, in fact, a great disservice to those of us who are prone to or appreciative of those other realities of the mind.

The history of madness in the Western world begins with the Dionysian orgies that celebrated the irrational and reveled in the amoral energy of the animal frenzy that characterizes the chaos of creation.

In the Middle Ages, the church viewed insanity as a spiritual problem. For the medieval church, madness was a manifestation of sin, demonic possession, or moral defect. The only solution to the problem of madness, therefore, lay within church ritual, rigorous religious instruction, and failing all, exorcism.

Cut to the Renaissance and the “secularization” of the world and the hunger for knowledge. As the Western world became more secular in character, so did its solutions to the problem of madness. So far, the mad had been part of the family and of society—to be hidden, to be reviled, to be ashamed of, but to be kept within the fold, so to speak. Now there was no (un)earthly reason to “keep” and “hold” them. The figure of the wandering, vagabond madman came into being, living off the land and off charity outside the city limits like Poor Tom in King Lear.

In the later Renaissance, a more “global” society found a more efficient way to dispose of unwanted “fools” and the precursor to the toxic-waste dump-yards-of-the-sea, “the Ship of Fools” came into being. Unwanted social garbage was “embarked” and put to sea.

The next paradigm shift takes us to the 18th century and the development of the “rational” and “scientific” study of medicine and for the first time, madness came to be seen as a disease analogous to physical sickness. Physical cures were popularly prescribed to cure mental illness and madmen became objects of pity instead of blame.

Enter the hospital and later, the asylum.

That’s where the journey seems to have ended and Western society seems now only to be interested in finding ever-more “diseases” that afflict the human mind. What this does is entrench the idea of “normal” and “healthy” until every deviation is “unhealthy” and “abnormal.” Guess where this is going!

Odd as this seems given our restrictive, traditional societies, the East still accords more freedom to alternative ways of thinking and living and our lives include an everyday, banal tolerance of the unusual.

This is because we really don’t have a “past” history. We live concurrently in several centuries at once and so are not rooted in any one zeitgeist. Whatever the thought, whatever the lifestyle, whatever the anomaly, it is all valid in some part of some reality in a country of a billion people living in a billion times!