The motives of selflessness

Aid is widespread. There are NGOs everywhere, and volunteers eager to help out. People from everywhere have contributed generously.

During the two days I was at Nagapattinam, I worked with the YMCA and Seva Bharati.

The YMCA was handling the situation at a general hospital, situated around a kilometre from the sea. Waves had flooded congested rooms that had once been a nursing school. The water had been drained away, but one can still see the mark (around 4 feet high) on the walls. We cleaned up and put back benches and tables that had been left out to dry. Later we helped shift medicines, sent in by Unicef, to a godown. I still wonder why the government hospital workers weren’t transporting the medicines to camps. Perhaps I’m unduly sceptical.

Seva Bharati is the NGO that belongs to the RSS. These chaps were unbelievably helpful in the villages we visited. It’s hard to imagine that it’s these same people who go around defacing everything on Valentine’s Day (and that’s not the worst of what they do!)

Along with the Seva Bharati members, all clad in their Khaki shorts and armed with spades, shovels and containers to carry mud, we visited a couple of villages and helped restore houses that would serve as temporary shelters for the affected.

Yet underlying the goodwill live the hidden agendas of religious, political and other sorts.

An old woman complains to us, how she has been wearing the same clothes since the wave hit, while in other villages children use brand new saris as swings.

Cooking utensils, bed sheets, kerosene stoves are brought to the doors of people who were barely affected by the sea, because a certain some one knows a certain some one else who knows an MLA to whom a certain some one else owes a favour… you know how it works in India.

Of course one can’t have goodness without a profit. It’s just bad business logic!

Note: I wouldn’t give my money to the PM’s relief fund, sure he’s a nice guy, but he doesn’t personally hand out the relief to the deserving. The money gets filtered before it reaches the affected.

Some of the organisations that I'd recommend are
South Indian Federation of Fishermen Societies: http://www.siffs.org/
Sneha: Nagapattinam Tel: 04365 - 222 907, 240 622
AID India: http://www.aidindia.org/