On some roadblock a blind beggar knocked on the window of our car, and I turned him away.
Then a few seconds later, a fruit vendor selling Boroi (indian jujube) also knocked on my window, and I was equally dismissive. The vendor walked away, and ran into the blind man. And without missing a beat, he took one fruit from the basket above his head, and handed it to the blind beggar. There was no exchange of words of thanks, nothing, both of them carried on as business as usual. And I felt pretty ashamed.
One of the topics that I work with in my profession is the idea of scaleup. You can easily do a set of things for one person, and that makes a difference in her/his life. But when you talk about helping a bunch of people, say, a thousand people, you lose the intensity of your effort, and in turn also the effectiveness a bit. Helping an unknown mass of people does not bring the satisfaction equaling this one person who you get to know. So, a lot of research is geared toward exploring what happens when you dial down your effort to reach more people.
I'm bringing this up because I think I've reached a stage where I see unknown masses, and don't notice people anymore. So it's like "Fruit Vendor", "Blind Beggar", "Street Children", "Rickshawala" "Kharaji/Bideshi trying to find themselves in the trenches of third world", "junkie", etc. and this generalization lets me go through life efficiently. It's easy to ignore people when you reduce them to their lowest common stereotypes.
And we all know that individual acts matter. There's a new HBO documentary called a Small Act, which tells the story of Chris Mburu, a Kenyan who received about $15 a month from a Swedish Nurse (I think) named Hilde Back to complete his primary education. He grows up to go to Harvard, becomes a UN human rights lawyer, and creates a foundation under his sponsor's name. And she had no idea what happened to him, she just did this act because she wanted to.
So how small is too small? Should I donate $10 to one person or donate $1 to ten people. Where does effectiveness end? Hell if I know.
