My Mom recently told me this story: when she was growing up, her family had a neighbor, a single man in his fifties. Since India was, in those days, a far less suspicious society, this "uncle" - who worked as an engineer - used to come over every few days and help my mother and her brothers with their homework.
When it came time for him to retire, he moved to the hills and donated all his money to an ashram. The operators of the ashram took his money and threw him out. He eventually moved to a small Southern state, earned just enough to establish a small trust, and started a school for girls, where he now goes every day to teach.
As a journalist, I worry about what it means to "give back," since there isn't always a clear relationship between what I do for a living and social benefit (a problem accentuated, recently, by the increasing number of news orgs that are losing their audience to websites). Another journalist I know recently referred to mass media as "no different from selling soap"; which is depressing even though it's true.
But then I hear stories like the one above, or the story of my own great-grandfather. He was born in pre-independence India and ran a factory that sold fabric to the British, although after meeting Gandhi he gave part of that up.
But there are a few other interesting facts about him which aren't part of the official biography: as a businessman, he lived in a massive company-provided property. One year when there was massive flooding in Calcutta, he opened his house to the entire community. Another year, two schoolteachers at the neighborhood school fell in love, and the parents' association asked him to fire them both. He talked with the offending couple and ended up sponsoring their wedding.
He sent every one of his three daughters to college (a luxury that he could afford), and when the time came for them to get married, he insisted on marrying them without dowry, thus ending - at least in his family - two of the more regressive and negative traditions in Indian society.
When I look at my grandmother, my mother and myself, I see clearly the legacy of my great-grandfather's character, of the way he lived his life. He gave his children an enormous amount of opportunity, and the results are still visible in my family generations later in their values and outlook.
My thoughts distill into two distinct streams: 1) that a profession is, at the end of the day, the sum of what we do "publicly" and while this matters, our "private" decisions (how we treat our families, friends, strangers, etc) often have as lasting an impact and 2) the notion that what we "give back" can be separated from the other aspects of our lives is utterly false.
My great grandfather was not religious, but no one ever heard him raise his voice in anger. Although he was fluent in five languages, he never looked down on his wife for having no more than an eighth grade education. His daughters are musicians, artists and poets, his grand-daughters and great-granddaughters have graduate qualifications, careers and independent lives.
By contrast. When I was 17, I visited my grandmother (on the other side of my family.) In front of a roomful of people, she asked what I planned to study in college. I said, "journalism." Someone else said, "Not medicine?" She sighed, nodded, and said "well, what do you expect? She's a girl; after all." I was speechless, so it fell to my mother to step in and say, "As we all know, girls are smarter than boys - that's why they do better in the classroom."
I'm not sure that my grandmother agreed - but then she, after all, had been pulled out of school at 14 to get married.
Years later, after she'd passed away, I was going through the small stack of documents that counted as her papers. I found a folded-up piece of newspaper, which when I opened it turned out to be one of the first articles I'd ever had published. I don't know where or how she got it - she never left the house, and that particular newspaper isn't readily available in the city where she lived. She had nothing else of her grandchildren's - no college diplomas from my male cousins, none of their academic citations.
For better or for worse, one of my grandmothers lived her entire life believing that women could never equal men. The other, meanwhile, never doubted it. In a rapidly developing society like India's, where values, education and prosperity don't clearly align, these are not inconsequential distinctions. Whatever my great grandfather's factory may or may not have produced, one of the most significant decisions he made in his life was to pass on to his daughters the belief that knowledge has inherent value, and that both men and women benefit from receiving it.
This is what I mean by giving back - it's not just about spouting grand ideas - it's about being an original thinker, about being willing to stand outside the norm when the occasion calls for it.
Here's what I'm beginning to realize: what we "give back" or even "give forward" has nothing to do with stage in life, with financial status, with job description, with extra-curricular activity, with location. It is a function of character, which doesn't depend on circumstances.
When it came time for him to retire, he moved to the hills and donated all his money to an ashram. The operators of the ashram took his money and threw him out. He eventually moved to a small Southern state, earned just enough to establish a small trust, and started a school for girls, where he now goes every day to teach.
As a journalist, I worry about what it means to "give back," since there isn't always a clear relationship between what I do for a living and social benefit (a problem accentuated, recently, by the increasing number of news orgs that are losing their audience to websites). Another journalist I know recently referred to mass media as "no different from selling soap"; which is depressing even though it's true.
But then I hear stories like the one above, or the story of my own great-grandfather. He was born in pre-independence India and ran a factory that sold fabric to the British, although after meeting Gandhi he gave part of that up.
But there are a few other interesting facts about him which aren't part of the official biography: as a businessman, he lived in a massive company-provided property. One year when there was massive flooding in Calcutta, he opened his house to the entire community. Another year, two schoolteachers at the neighborhood school fell in love, and the parents' association asked him to fire them both. He talked with the offending couple and ended up sponsoring their wedding.
He sent every one of his three daughters to college (a luxury that he could afford), and when the time came for them to get married, he insisted on marrying them without dowry, thus ending - at least in his family - two of the more regressive and negative traditions in Indian society.
When I look at my grandmother, my mother and myself, I see clearly the legacy of my great-grandfather's character, of the way he lived his life. He gave his children an enormous amount of opportunity, and the results are still visible in my family generations later in their values and outlook.
My thoughts distill into two distinct streams: 1) that a profession is, at the end of the day, the sum of what we do "publicly" and while this matters, our "private" decisions (how we treat our families, friends, strangers, etc) often have as lasting an impact and 2) the notion that what we "give back" can be separated from the other aspects of our lives is utterly false.
My great grandfather was not religious, but no one ever heard him raise his voice in anger. Although he was fluent in five languages, he never looked down on his wife for having no more than an eighth grade education. His daughters are musicians, artists and poets, his grand-daughters and great-granddaughters have graduate qualifications, careers and independent lives.
By contrast. When I was 17, I visited my grandmother (on the other side of my family.) In front of a roomful of people, she asked what I planned to study in college. I said, "journalism." Someone else said, "Not medicine?" She sighed, nodded, and said "well, what do you expect? She's a girl; after all." I was speechless, so it fell to my mother to step in and say, "As we all know, girls are smarter than boys - that's why they do better in the classroom."
I'm not sure that my grandmother agreed - but then she, after all, had been pulled out of school at 14 to get married.
Years later, after she'd passed away, I was going through the small stack of documents that counted as her papers. I found a folded-up piece of newspaper, which when I opened it turned out to be one of the first articles I'd ever had published. I don't know where or how she got it - she never left the house, and that particular newspaper isn't readily available in the city where she lived. She had nothing else of her grandchildren's - no college diplomas from my male cousins, none of their academic citations.
For better or for worse, one of my grandmothers lived her entire life believing that women could never equal men. The other, meanwhile, never doubted it. In a rapidly developing society like India's, where values, education and prosperity don't clearly align, these are not inconsequential distinctions. Whatever my great grandfather's factory may or may not have produced, one of the most significant decisions he made in his life was to pass on to his daughters the belief that knowledge has inherent value, and that both men and women benefit from receiving it.
This is what I mean by giving back - it's not just about spouting grand ideas - it's about being an original thinker, about being willing to stand outside the norm when the occasion calls for it.
Here's what I'm beginning to realize: what we "give back" or even "give forward" has nothing to do with stage in life, with financial status, with job description, with extra-curricular activity, with location. It is a function of character, which doesn't depend on circumstances.
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