Brown Man's Burden

Vijay teaches in the English department in a small American town in Prasenjit Gupta’s short story “A Brown Man”. He is single. His mother in India wants him to marry an Indian girl; no foreigners were to be trusted. So Vijay found Asha his girl friend for three years until she – more liberal in her ways than even the white girls his mother worried about, left Vijay for a hippie.

Vijay is single and lonely and his departmental senior Philip and wife Sharon are good friends and they are trying to act match maker; but that is not going to work for Vijay is very conscious of parental authority and won’t do any thing that will offend his mother, but then Philip and Sharon do not know that of course. So they introduce to Vijay, a distant cousin by the name of Amy who is on a short vocation and staying with them. Vijay is not too interested; remember his mother is wary of white girls out to seduce her son, but out of courtesy to Philip and Sharon who are good people, he agrees to spend some time with Amy and “show her around” the town.

Amy is a good enough girl but Vijay is not interested; he has already been hurt once and remember; his mother has warned him to wary of the white girls. “Don’t bring home a foreigner” was the unambiguous message. Though they go out several times and though they get along well enough, there is no trace of romance. He shares about the Indian girl who left him and she in turn tells him about the boy who left her. Slowly he is falling in love with a white woman despite all the warnings that he has received. On one of his monthly phone calls to his mother, he crosses the Rubicon by telling his mother that he has been seeing a white girl. She sighs into the phone. A sigh of hopelessness.

It is the end of Amy’s vacation and they are going out for their last outing. Amy has never looked more beautiful and Vijay knows that if he must propose, this has to be the night. As they are settling into their meal, a white man comes and sits down opposite their seat and looks disdainfully at him and admiringly at Amy. Vijay shrinks within himself as he remembers the many times he has been snubbed at by white people over the years. The dinner ends with the proposal never uttered and Vijay drives a very visibly low Amy back home. The next day, as Vijay drops Amy to the airport, she casually mentions that her old boy friend wants reconciliation and she was open. Vijay shrivels further inwards as he bids her good bye … for the last time and heads back home.

Is racism for real or is it an imagined shadow that Vijay seems to see every where, often without any substantial basis ? His colleague Philip and his wife Sharon cared enough about him to notice his loneliness and try and do some match making and Amy as she went out with him, evening after evening dared to hope that the man she had come to love and to admire would one day propose to her. But though he skirted edgily around the subject, he never did. He was haunted by his own mother’s demons – that white American girl was bad though Vijay’s own experience was to have been let down by an Indian girl trying hard to be “Western”.

Now that racism is no longer institutionalized, it is obviously that much more difficult to track down and identify. And how much of it is real and how much of it is magnified by past experiences, mental imagery, perceptions –true and imagined that we end up interpreting wrongly and often with tragic consequences as happened with Vijay? Vijay’s interpretation of what a white woman would be like was largely conditioned by what his mother whispered on the phone as they talked every month and indeed in India, even before he had left the country’s shores to go to America. Although he had enough caring white people in his life, he still could not bring himself to trust himself and trust them when it came to the defining moment of his life and that moment eventually passed him by.

We talk often of stereotyping – racial and ethnic and religious and others and imagine that these flawed judgments that we make of others harm them, discriminate against them, and deny them opportunities….. But stereotyping is actually like a boomerang it comes back and denies us the very same joys that we imagine others are losing out on.

Money : Giving it All Away

Those who work in the charity sector have a lot to do with donors and typically one comes across one of two types : the obnoxious kind who makes it very clear from the first encounter that they see the charity worker and his agency as nothing more than a glorified beggar. Often this kind is usually not even dealing or handing out his own money. He or she is more likely to be some technical minion for a face less multi lateral or bilateral entity but looking at the airs that the workers put on, one could be excused for assuming that that they are actually reaching into their pockets and purses and making grants.

The other kind is the old style philanthropist – the one who actually gives out his own cash and sees himself as a partner in the whole exercise. Such donors see themselves as partners and catalysts in a much larger vision in which the agency is on the ground is the pivotal player and all others including themselves as ancillary services supporting the hard work on the ground. The first kind of donor may be more professional in their approach, but perhaps it is the second kind who invests a charitable entity with passion, zest and energy that bureaucratic processes can never deliver, no matter how efficient the number crunching. This piece is a sketch of one such philanthropist and how it made a difference and whether we in India will get to the point where philanthropy not only becomes a way of life and people no longer flaunt their wealth but create examples that are worthy of emulation.

Tom White is a devout Catholic and a World War II veteran who returned from the war to inherit his father’s heavy machinery and construction business in the United States and over time made a lot of money. That was in the late 40s. Since then over the next 55 years, Tom White has given away $75 million, pretty much all of his assets. At 84, the construction millionaire has given away his fortune. If he has his way, he’ll be down to his last quarter when he draws his last breath. He has supported more than 100 causes over the years, but his biggest gift by far has gone to Partners in Health, the program made famous last year with the publication of Tracy Kidder’s book “Mountains Beyond Mountains.” As Time Magazine which declared him as the philanthropist of the year in 2001, what set Tom White apart from the other givers like Warren Buffet or Bill Gates or the others is that most” big givers don’t start redistributing their loot until they have made a pile, and many generous magnates, like Turner and Bill Gates, remain very rich even after they have made headlines for their charity.”

The gross inequities in the distribution of wealth in the world and especially among the poor challenged Tom White, relatively less wealthy man compared to the 4 billionaires from India in the latest Forbes’ top 10 billionaires list and the 53 over all billionaires from India in the list of the word’s 1000 richest people. A lot of the social sector work that the government should be doing for its citizens does not get done because our government’s spending priorities are skewed towards national security. India’s defence budget is 960 billion rupees (£12bn) compared with 150.2bn rupees (£1.9bn) for health and 330bn rupees (£4bn) for education - considerably less than the pledged 6 per cent of GDP. With the kind of wealth that now resides in Indian hands, it is embarrassing to say the least that a significant part of the money that supplements the government efforts comes from abroad. Foreign contributions and donations to scores of Indian voluntary organizations, religious groups and charitable institutions every year touch nearly Rs 5,000 crore (Rs 50 billion). Indian philanthropists are badly needed if we are to ever reduce this dependence. But do we have any Tom Whites among us ?