[First published in Mid-Day]

The blogosphere has imperceptibly risen to great importance in my life. The same time as being intangible, (that is why it is called virtual isn’t it), it is also a more visible sphere. The readers have names, you can interact with them, the comment-war can sometimes become unending. And there are no national boundaries.

A piece I wrote for a web journal called Kafila was linked to some other blogs and in one day alone, at one blog alone, there were over a hundred comments.

Apart from blogs, which is a sort of personal space with a public view, there are also mailing lists where critical discussions take a different form than a newspaper or a printed magazine.

One such mailing list is the sarai reader list where I often have conversations about very diverse issues. I am going to reproduce one such conversation here that relates to a topic close to my heart, but distant from my engagements.

It is related to begging. The first part is from someone called Vicharak and it raises interesting questions about the practice and some of his concerns are widely shared.

“Today in the morning I was returning from my office, when I stopped at a red light, I saw a beggar knocking at the window of my car asking for ‘something’. At the same time, she was trying to show a glimpse of her malnourished baby, may be to stir up my emotional nerves so that I may ‘help’ her. On the next red light I saw an old man doing the same.

During these moments, many thoughts passed through my mind. Will it be justified to pay in kind or cash? Why have these people chosen to beg? Who is responsible for their state? If a person is physically fit to work why is he or she is not doing any job or they don’t get it? On what basis to differentiate who is fit to receive ‘charity’ and who is not? What is the responsibility of the state and society towards them?

By paying them are we not trying to make to continue the same? If we don’t pay them will they be able to survive? Most of the ladies are carrying small babies, are these their own babies or available on rent? If these women are married, then what are their husbands doing? Do they have a notion of a family as a unit? How do they find a match for marriage? How does their kinship network operate? Is paying to ‘them’ a charity on ‘our’ part?”

Here was my response-

“Allow me to say this that our utmost confidence and familiarity about begging and beggars springs, eventually, from our abysmal ignorance of it. I have been looking, for years, for a single book on beggars, a single documentary, a single article… Is there anyway of going beyond the duality of helpless victims/terrorised gang members?

For starters, in begging, location is the first, the second and the third most important criterion-so what are the hafta rates for the Ashram crossing? Who all charge that hafta? Obviously, beggars at shrines, dargahs, mandirs, etc are among the elite category of beggars. So how does one arrive there? Who assures one’s space? What is the system of graft, bribe, cutback, etc in these places?

Who then are the gang operators? Where do these members go at night? Do people travel to beg? It won’t do to counterpose begging to work for beggary is hard work and does not come easy. It takes great dedication and commitment to run after cars, scooters, apathetic passengers of a bus, etc. So what drives those kids and those oldies – not starvation in most cases…

Begging is also performance art of a kind. When you see a prospective donor hesitate what is the Rasa that you should strike-karuna, veebhatsa?
Should you frighten the bugger about his privilege status or should you invoke his mercy? Obviously every beggar is beseeching the donor/customer, so what peculiarity can you bring to it. You have to switch onto the performance when you approach the car/auto, then switch off and then switch on again for the next one. But what do you do when the light is green?

After experimental Urdu afsana of the 60s kind I have never read about beggars. It is quite astonishing. Isn’t it that the phenomenon, like roadside shitting, is so pervasive in our society that, pace Naipaul, we can be wholly oblivious to it? Urban designers, cyber-mohallas, installation artists (of which beggars are the primary founders), body specialists, anthropologists, radicals, subalterns, thinkers, desis, videsis. Where are the voices on beggar’s buggery?”

This finally is a totally different take from Aasim Khan.

“I travelled for the first time to the West last year… and one of the first things I noticed was that even they had their beggars. I was walking to the underground in London and on one corner sat a man (dressed in cargos and jackets… and was by all standards ok health wise) under his scrubby face hung a big note Homeless And Hungry. He was silent and still! Also was not trying to capture my attention, no performance.

But among all those fast paced men and women in their GAP jeans he stood out (though he squatted). Everyone was going somewhere he wasn’t.”