"Kindness as Forbidden Pleasure"

The modern world exhorts us to take pleasure in possessions, in power, success, and independence. In Mumbai, just like any other major world City, having “Made it” seems to involve accumulating property, land and acquiring great financial wealth.  It is through with these things, we often have the illusion that we are indestructible and our true dependence on others is dispensed with.   Kindness to people, it seems, is increasingly becoming something akin to being a little dumb, or foolish and wearing bad sandals.

Freud believed that there is more than one sort of kindness.  There is kindness as a moral obligation, ‘I should be kind or people won’t like me’, or kindness as calculated bribery, “I’m going to be nice to her so that she will do xyz for me later”. Then there is a genuine kindness - a deep desire that arises in a person. The psychoanalyst Adam Phillips says that people come to therapy not because they are more unhappy than anyone else, but because they feel “limited in their capacity to care for others”.

Walking alone through Breach Candy last night, a wealthy area of South Mumbai, I passed half a dozen people, curled up, some on straw mats, on the streets where they will sleep for the night.  This is their home. There was a huddle of three mothers and two small children no more than three or four years old. I don’t know their names.  Maybe like my dear friends, their names are Pooja, or Parveen or Angali.  I don’t know how these mothers came to be on the streets, or whether they will eat tonight, or if like me as a mother, they are scared that if they sleep, their children might be taken or wander off.  One of these little children looks just like the son of friends of mine.  He has a cheeky alert face. He is on the streets because when he was born, he was undoubtedly issued fewer tickets in the lottery of security and pleasures than my friend’s son. 

It strikes me that our moral actions, what we do when faced with an opportunity to act with kindness, are deeply contextualised and located.  If these mothers and their children were sitting in this awful deprived state, in the village of Piddinghoe in England, where I used to live, any number of neighbours I can think of would quickly have them under their roof.  Neighbours like Gill would produce cakes and have toys out for the children, Chandra would be on the phone to some politician seeking guidance to help them and Mike next door would no-doubt be doing all sorts of kind things, especially if he could do them without people knowing.

But this is not Piddinghoe.  It is Mumbai and the problems of homelessness, massive poverty and starvation, seem so insurmountable that we have to keep a distance.  To imagine these mothers as human beings, with thoughts and feelings just like my friends Pooja, Parveen and Anjali, is virtually unbearable.  We cannot bear such closeness, such proximity, even in our imagination.  The British Psychoanalyst and paediatrician, Donald Winnicott wrote extensively on the human dance of closeness and distance.  We distance in order to defend something – pain in this case, of avoiding connecting with the deep suffering of others.  We distance in order not to bear any responsibility for their suffering.  Perhaps we distance ourselves from the joy of being kind to them. Mothers have to learn to gradually distance themselves more, from their growing children, step by step, least they smother their children’s confidence and belief in their ability to explore the world with some independence. Distance isn’t always inadvisable.  But distance invariably leads to disinterest.

One way some of the wealthy citizens of Mumbai distance themselves from the suffering of others, is by never leaving the comfort of the rear seat of their chauffeur driven cars.  They rarely take to the streets and step closely amongst the poor.  One client of mine took the risk of closeness, deliberately, in order to feel the pulse of the City.  Walking close to the railway station he found a baby girl on a pile of rubbish.  What struck him most was how many people simply looked at this baby girl and walked on by.   He took action and she is now funded by him, safely in a very good orphanage. Just as the writer C.S.Lewis said, “The greatest mystery of life is to give is to receive”. This man feels genuinely good about himself, more than any kind of person acquiring might and is now investing time and money in those like this baby girl born with few tickets.

The only vague sense of a rulebook of kindness is perhaps the kindness expected of parents towards their children. It seems it is the one area of virtually international agreement where kindness is expected, with a lot of country-level variation of course.  But what does kindness mean to those in such unfortunate positions as these mothers and their children on the streets? 

Psychoanalysis reminds us there is enjoyment in hate which prevents kindness.  There is pleasure to be had, although only confessed to with some difficulty, in discharging our aggression, our spite, our envy, our retaliation. The pleasure of hate takes the time when we might otherwise be kind. There are dangers of course in feeling too much. But it is only those humans who have learned to bare frustration – our self-satisfying narcissistic pleasures who are capable of putting the needs of others before one’s own.  Freud believed that those with a deeply rooted sense of kindness are much less susceptible to moral coercion of what the masses are doing, like mindlessly chasing money, and able to live more fully from their own conscious and what their particular version of ‘right’ is.

Gandhi once said that “He simply wanted to please his own conscience which is God’s”.  In Hindu scripts we are asked to act with kindness and not expect gratitude, Christianity asks of us to “Love thy neighbour”, and Muslims remind us to give 10% of our wealth to the poor. All religions and faiths preach the importance of kindness. But if a visit to the Church, the Mosque or the Temple doesn’t translate into humanitarian action, into the daily grind of kindness, it seems a rather pointless exercise, and little more than a few hours spent wearing a faith as though it is merely a religious jacket, to take on and off at will.

There is a wonderful movement called “Random Acts of Kindness”.  Quite simply, one performs a random selfless act, to make the wellbeing of a stranger just a little better. Creative friends of mine once spent a day randomly giving strawberries to strangers who looked unhappy.  Another gathered up as many elderly people as she could who were going to be alone over the Christmas holidays.  They all came to her table for the day. She had cancer at the time, yet doing this made her feel good and she lost her absorption in her own suffering for a while.  Along with the bunch of ole folks, she was able to enjoy the reality that we are deeply dependent on others, and that is not such a bad thing. In fact it’s a pleasure.  

There is a lovely little book called “Kindness”, where the authors assert, that children are born kind; that it is the family that is the primary site that children learn to value or fail to value kindness.  Highly self-involved parents teach their children the values of self-absorption.  Parents only interested in their children’s grades in examination, will of course fail to nourish their offspring’s moral development and humanity towards others. Yet sometimes, that brutality nurtures a compassion for others, learned through one’s own suffering.

One of the living Indian Saint’s from Kerala is called Amma.  She is known as the ‘Hugging Saint’ for the way she gives love by hugging people fifteen hours a day.  She lives and practices the most profound compassion and love for all of humanity, in providing numerous schools, hospitals and homes for those in dire need of care and consideration.  She lives a frugile existence in a room, just six feet by six feet. May be she will not change the world.  But she will have the joy of knowing that she is taking a slice of the world’s poverty and making it her responsibility.

She is the happiest person I have encountered.  People like Amma, existing with such few needs, disturb the consensus of the masses that kindness is sacrifice rather than pleasure. People who are highly generous to others, yet seem to have virtually nothing by way of our material standards of success, disturb us.  They rattle our theories about ourselves. They risk closeness and seem to be enjoying it. They are a threat.

Whatever the names of the mothers on the street are, whether one is called Anjali, another is called Pooja, and the other is called Parveen. I still wonder what your names are and what new kinds of conversations are possible.