A bejewelled dowager
stepped out of a fashionable hotel in London where she had been dining and
dancing all evening at a Charity Ball for the support of street urchins. She
was about to get into her Rolls Royce when a street urchin walked up to her and
whined, " Spare me sixpence, ma'am, for charity. I haven't eaten for two
days." The duchess recoiled from the kid. " You ungrateful
wretch!" she exclaimed." Don't you realise, I've been dancing for you
all night?"
I get a great kick out of serving you- but I still insist that you be grateful!!
Aren't we all like that obscenely affluent woman longing to be recognised and acknowledged for our 'services'? Is anyone of us really altruistic? I'm reading a fascinating book, " Missionaries in Africa and the Muslim mystics on the sub-continent " by Edmund Bringe. He writes, "The very idea of service has a motive behind it and even if there's no concrete motive, there's always a mild desire to receive gratitude. There has never been completely nameless, selfless and desireless service in the annals of mankind. The Christian missionaries in the first half of the seventeenth century (Christianity arrived in Africa in 1652) brought the native Africans out of their feral existence and Christianised them.
The missionaries 'served' the Africans and
served their god. The Muslim mystics from Arab and Persia came to the
sub-continent. They helped the poor with a view to making them Muslims. All had
an agenda. No service is above self." The Urdu adage,
"Neki kar dariya mein daal" ('Do good and forget for good' as a
Biblical advice) has a lofty philosophy in it but how many of us follow it to
the hilt? Man never wants his services to go unacknowledged and in vain. He
wants his service to be converted into tangible returns or at least a
fleeting mention of it.
Please
don't get me wrong or call me a cynical but let me ask you, how come we
get to know that a very rich man or a celebrity has donated a certain
amount for the 'upliftment' of a village or an underprivileged section of the
society? Their spokespersons 'reveal' the exact pieces of their charity
information because the 'donors' somewhere want their 'noble deeds' to be
acknowledged. We all hanker after publicity and want recognition.
Angelina Jolie, Madonna and other Hollywood
celebrities are on an adoption spree (with some Indian actresses like
Sushmita Sen following suit), adopting destitute children from Africa
and third world countries as 'an act of 'selfless' parental' love.' Then why so
much fanfare? Go and adopt without the glare of media. Some may say that our
charity needs no public acknowledgement. It only requires god to acknowledge
it. The bottomline is: Someone must recognise, whether people or
god! Dr Martin Luther King Jr used to say, " Service without an
iota of any kind of expectation from man and god is the most sublime
service."
-----Sumit Paul