The Heart of Giving

  AS WE CELEBRATE Deepavali in India, it is perhaps the best time to reflect on giving back and how in India we have created a culture of supporting communities that are less privileged and of going out of our way to help those who need help. I was always against the phrase ‘corporate social responsibility’ (CSR) because I felt it was more out of mandate than out of heart. But over the years, one has seen the landscape of corporate India change.

I have seen more and more young Indians giving back and pledging a lot of their wealth. The Tatas have led with grace, hu­mility and aplomb in everything they have done. The Tata Trusts, which are now 133 years old, were formed with only one purpose, and the purpose was that the profits must be ploughed back to help the communities that abound and the society they serve.

But today you have shining examples of giving back like one hadn’t imagined before. If you look at what Azim Premji has done, or for that matter the young Kamath brothers are doing, or what Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw continues to do, we can say that Indian philanthropy is truly changing for the better. And there are millions of such examples.

But let us go back in time. All said and done, other than the Tatas, the people who started giving back were the Marwaris and primarily in Calcutta.

Today, the fact that you have the Birla Hospitals supported by CK Birla and his family, whether it is the remarkable work that Sanjiv Goenka’s daughter-in-law, Shivika, is doing with the RP Goenka International School, these are all fine examples of how India has changed.

I remember that in my many conversations with the late stock market whiz Rakesh Jhunjhunwala, all he said was, “I want to continue to make money so that I can give back more and more.” And it gladdens one’s heart to see his widow, Rekha, continues that with the zeal Jhunjhunwala had.

But it is important to stress why it is necessary for us to give back, and for that we need to travel in time.

Culture, the arts, and societies were served by those who could afford to serve them, those who could plough some of their wealth back into society. We didn’t need a Bill Gates or Warren Buffett in India to talk about charity because Manu in Manusmriti had already talked about daan as the epitome of human service. That too, almost 4,000 years ago.

Looking back, we will see that in our country wealth has al­ways been parted with in great measure, sometimes out of guilt, but mostly out of compassion. Many used to mock the fact that the Birlas continued to build temples because the superstition was that the day they stopped, there would be deaths in the fam­ily. But the Birlas didn’t do it for that reason. The fact that one of the first heart hospitals dedicated to cardiac care was the BM Birla Heart Hospital in Calcutta is evidence that the Birlas supported  the sciences, medicine and healthcare like no one else did, not because they needed to but because they wanted to.

The Parsis in Bombay have done amazing work, whether it is the hospitals they set up or community living. More recently, just before he died, Ratan Tata created India’s first all-purpose animal hospital.

It is important for us to talk about these people not because they need talking about but because they serve as inspiration to everyone who can and must give back. They serve as examples of fine humanity, and they serve as the epitome of what a wealthy society should be.

A wealthy society is not known by the number of billionaires it has but by the number of people it pulls out of poverty, the num­ber of people it gives succour to and provides for.

That is the kernel of compassion. It cannot be measured in a percentage of profits you plough back into the much-abused CSR. It has to be a definition of how you see your role in society.

I remember many years ago when the late Lord Meghnad Desai and Lady Desai came to see me about setting up the Partition Museum in Amritsar. I immediately helped with it, not because of our families, though we are from Amritsar and were never involved in Partition in the sense that we weren’t uprooted because we were always on the Indian side. I thought it was important to give whatever I could so that one could support knowledge, learning, and a sense of history.

The late Arun Jaitley famously said that the Partition Museum is not a museum to reflect on the tragedy that Partition was. Instead, it is a mu­seum which represents the hope that humanity can have in restarting lives.

Look around the world. If you look at America, other than for tax reasons, it has blazed a trail as far as philanthro­py is concerned. Almost every muse­um has had multiple benefactors.

More recently, I was delighted to see two buildings and two names of Indians, both at the University of Oxford—the upcoming Ratan Tata Centre and the donation that Cyrus Poonawalla ofthe SerumInstitute of India has made. Just last week, his son Adar Poonawalla gave the largest single donation to the Science Museum in Lon­don. These are important milestones in a country’s progress and its march towards prosperity.

It is not about how much you give; it is also about where you give. Look at what Ratan Tata did with cancer care in India, whether the care centres, the national grid, or for that matter the focus of Tata Trusts. That tells you the purpose of philanthropy. And that purpose has always been to elevate people and extricate them from abject poverty. I believe there is no better time than Deepavali to do that.

I have never played cards and I abhor them, but to each their own. It is not a time just to play cards or greet people or do all the crazy things they do. It is perhaps also a time to reflect that when Lakshmi comes to your home, you cannot just greet her. You must thank her and ask her for greater inspiration so that you can be a mini-Lakshmi to many such homes that don’t have the benefit of or wealth yet. That will be the true celebration of Deepavali and that of wealth.

Wealth can only be defined by your propensity to give and not by your ability to earn.