Do you give money to beggars?

Last night a beggar accosted me at University Road crossing and left me very disturbed.I do not give money to beggars as a matter of principle. I have always believed that anyone who can’t work to support themselves doesn’t deserve to get it free. I’ve lately come to believe that giving money to beggars is not just a bad idea, it’s plain evil. When you give money to a beggar, you’re destroying his will to support himself. A beggar who’s not had to support himself for a while no longer knows how to. He’s permanently disabled, using society as a crutch. And it only gets worse with time.If you’ve ever walked down Koregaon Park road with a fair skinned person and seen beggars swarming around him, you know how when you try to pry the beggars off, they tell you to stop hassling them so they may continue hassling your friend. Their dependence on the societal crutch has grown to the extent that they consider this their God-given right.If you really care for their welfare, you should give your money or time to an organisation that helps put beggars back on their feet.Except, in this case, this man wasn’t begging. He was trying to sell me a pack of ear-cleaning buds. I didn’t need it, I have a mostly unused pack at home. Then I saw the desperation on his face. He appealed in Hindi, said he had not eaten all day and if I could please buy one. But I didn’t want it! He appealed again. His desperation was soul stirring. I considered giving him some money and not taking his product, and then years of hardening against beggars kicked in: no giving money to beggars.By then he lost interest in me and moved on, and I suddenly realised that he wasn’t begging. He was offering me something tangible in exchange for the money. Despite his desperation, he hadn’t stooped to begging. Should I have bought his product just to acknowledge his honour?It was too late now. He was gone and I was very disturbed. I tried consoling myself with cold capitalistic reasoning, that if he wanted money, he should sell something people want to buy; but it didn’t work. Other distractions on the road put him out of my mind until I got to bed, and then I couldn’t sleep. I cried.

I’m reminded now of a passage from the Rough Guide book, First-Time Around the World: Giving to beggarsYou learn a lot about yourself when you travel, and being confronted by beggars twenty times a day will certainly flex the bend of that learning curve. It’s a vexing issue. You’re walking around with more more money than these beggars may ever possess, yet you’ll have to return in less than a week if you start handing it out as you may like. Even if you give money to five people a day, you might be refusing it to fifteen. Or you give some coins to a starving woman and her two starving children and you walk off thinking that you could have easily done so much more.It’s common to feel callous — to the extent that you neglect to broach the subject with other travellers, including the ones you may be travelling with. Imaging you’re walking beside a traveller who is emotionally touched by a beggar when you’re not. They give and you don’t and when you continue walking there’s suddenly a little gap between you.There’s no right way to approach it. Some people hand out tiny coins to everyone they encounter. Some never do, but may contribute to a charity that can (hopefully) better distribute the funds. Most fail to adopt any sort of policy and just end up giving when they can no longer refuse, when they need an emotional lift (giving can be extremely rewarding), or when they’ve just spent too much on a meal and feel the pangs of guilt. Some try, with a look, to figure out if the funds will be used for alcohol or milk, and if they will be helping support the truly bereft. For this reason, many people prefer to carry tiny gifts or snacks to hand out (although this is not always appreciated).Begging can get aggravating at times, so aggravating that it’s possible to lose sight of the bigger picture: they are the ones with a life harder than anything you can imagine. Instead, you begin to feel like the victim. You feel like you’re viewed as nothing more than a walking money machine.

You think: “I’m spending my money in your country, trying to learn about you, and if you don’t plan to get to know me in a genuine way, I’d really prefer to be left alone once in a while. Come to my country and see how you like getting hassled for change all day.” Needless to say, try your best to keep things in perspective.

—Doug Lansky