I meet my parents often. It’s one of the many things in my life that I’m grateful for — that I live a short flight away from my parents’ city. The past year was particularly rich with trips, and I’ve been able to meet them practically every month or so. Spending time with my parents always reinforces to me what incredibly kind humans they both are. Here’s a sample of the kind of stuff my they do:
- At the village school my mother used to teach in, children never seemed to dress appropriately for Punjab’s sub-zero January winters. So my mother started to buy about fifty sweaters in different sizes, every year, and keep them at the school library, where kids would pick them up. Sometimes it had to be done more than once every winter, because children are kind too — they would give their sweaters to a parent or a sibling who worked in the fields and needed warmth more. My parents continue to do this annual sweater-shopping though it has been ten years since my mother retired from formal teaching. The owner of the shoe-shop across the street from the school has a standing request to repair or give new shoes to every school kid who walks in the store and to do this for free. He gives a monthly bill to my mother.
- The government of India launched the mid-day meal scheme in schools to improve school attendance and retention, but the budget for my mother’s school did not stretch to funds to buy plates. The food was good, children loved it, but the only way to eat it was to take rotis in their hand, pour the dal on top of the roti, and eat it before the dal soaked the roti through. After watching this food race for a week, my mother told my father, who found a wholesale store, bought two hundred plates, spoons and cups, and put them in the school kitchen.
I could list at least a dozen more such stories without straining my memory too hard. My parents aren’t rich, but they live comfortably and see their money as a way to address some of the injustice around them. I know they would be uncomfortable by this post because they don’t like talking about these things. Their acts of kindness are quiet. And they’re hyperlocal, by which I mean to say that my parents’ moral imagination primarily covers the community that they’re part of. My mother listens to me politely when I talk about my pain over people being killed for their meat preferences, over people’s freedom being taken away in the name of security, but she doesn’t lose sleep over any of this. It upsets me sometimes, her decision to “not talk about politics”. But I’m learning to respect my parents’ choice. The choice to practice focused compassion, to address the injustice that surrounds their immediate world, and to not have too much “planetal awareness”. Theirs is a philosophy that says that it is important to have our hearts stretched, but only up to a point. Our hearts are not infinitely elastic, and we need to protect them if we are to remain capable and whole. My mother’s brand of kindness starts to make sense to me when I look at the context of the world that she grew up in. It was a world that taught her to be demure and conservative, to mind her own business, to never be too loud.
So I’ve been thinking about kindness a lot, and the different forms it takes. And the more I think about kindness, the more I’m reminded of Muzaffar. Muzaffar, also known as Muzzu, is a very dear friend of mine. He also practises hyperlocal kindness, but it’s slightly different in style from my mother’s. For one thing, he doesn’t do small. In the world that he has grown up in, small acts of compassion aren’t enough. Small acts would disappear without a trace in the monumental chaos of corruption and politics, so Muzzu’s kindness takes the form of loud, action-oriented steps, and he doesn’t know how to stop. My mother expresses her courage and generosity through giving money. Muzzu does it by giving his time, his safety, his whole life. He’s a dentist, runs a social enterprise, and is a full-time practitioner of intense-no-holds-barred-kindness. Here are some of my favourite Muzzu stories:
- There’s a shortage of teachers in the government school in his neighbourhood, so Muzzu decides to spend the next year teaching at the school, 3 days a week.
- Pensioners in his neighbourhood don’t get paid for a few months. These are old people, they need money, and he wants to help, but not by giving them money, which would only solve the problem temporarily. He writes a petition to the pension office, and meets them, but that doesn’t work, so he files an RTI, organizes a march, writes an article in a newspaper, records video stories and starts sharing them — basically escalating until bureaucracy breaks down and pensions start to come in. Like I said, he doesn’t how when to stop.
- The government of India launched the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) to provide economic security to rural Indians. To manage the scheme, “ombudsmen” were appointed in each district. Corruption crept in, as it will; villagers weren’t getting the promised employment and ombudsmen needed to be held accountable. So of course, Muzzu spent months chasing RTIs and writing newspaper articles to make the processes transparent and public.
It’s easy to see how a dentist becomes an activist — he simply cares too much. In most places in the world, this kind of human would be a source of inspiration and pride, maybe even amusement at the lengths that he is willing to go to address injustice. But that would be most places in the world, not in Muzaffar’s world. And that is the biggest difference between the lives of Muzaffar and my mother: their context. His brand of kindness got him arrested on 5th of August 2019. Because he was born in Kashmir and because his kindness makes him a threat to security and sovereignty of a great nation.
