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The only just war (in my eyes)

Is the war on poverty.

America celebrates the 50th anniversary of what I consider to be its one and only just war--the war on poverty. One of the many points of inception of America's war on poverty was the passing of the food stamp act in 1964.

Food stamps, along with Medicaid and Head Start, among others, were foremost among the anti-poverty programs primarily conceptualized during the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson.

The first recipients of the food stamps program were residents of McDowell County, the poorest county in West Virginia. 

LBJ took a poverty tour of West Virginia in 1964 and was appalled to see first hand the desolation of the Appalachian region.

The Times has an interesting look at McDowell County fifty years later.

What do the red ants say?

Sanjay Kak's documentary on the Maoists of India, Red Ant Dream.

Angry white men and angry brown men

Two images expressing identical emotions--of anger and disempowerment. However, one expression of violence is outward, as the hand grasping the key chain with a cross-like emblem, suggests, while the other is internalized.

The fist, a synecdoche of the angry male in a new book called Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era, lashes out.

The bearded man in flames, on the other hand, looks inward. The second image represents a man burning up in totality. There is no symbolism here, but a blatant rendition of the fictional Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian man, whose death by self-immolation triggered off the Arab spring in 2010. Bouazizi is the principle character in Tahar Ben Jelloun's New Yorker fiction, By Fire (September 9, 2013). 

In Angry White Men, Michael Kimmel, a Sociology Professor at the State University of New York at Stonybrook, travels the nation and writes of working class white men of America who comprise an emerging class of disenfranchised males. They have lost their jobs, resist integrating into the new economy, have lost families and custody of their children, have impregnated girlfriends, whom they have then cast away as "sluts", and in general feel "betrayed by the country they love, discarded like trash on the side of the information superhighway."

Kimmel categorizes them as members of various organizations of "emasculated" (at the level of feeling) white males, like the KKK, the fringe NRA, The Father's Rights Movement (an offshoot of the Men's Right Movement). 

The men are justified in being angry, according to Kimmel, but they are unable to target the right sources that are responsible for their destitution and disempowerment in the first place--the corporate overlords, who have shipped their "masculine", i.e. manufacturing jobs overseas. The angry white men, rage, instead against women for allegedly "stealing American manhood." The angry white men, pissed upon and passed over by the current American economy, batter wives, blame ex-wives, subject girlfriends to domestic violence. 

There are no collective men in Ben Jalloun's story, but the voice of the main character, an unemployed youth in an unnamed Arab nation, could be said to be a representative voice of rising anger against the state. The story begins on a note of grim despair, with the young man returning home, alone and worried, after having buried his father at a cemetery. The son is struck less by grief than by the impending family obligation that as the oldest son of the family, he now has to fulfill.

The man is a college graduate with a degree in history. He is jobless and identified by the state as either a communist or an Islamist. The young man tries making a living as a fruit vendor, but he is persecuted by the police.

We get a hint that the polity of the nation is about to come apart, the youth are raging against the ruling class that is disconnected from the masses.

Anger is ubiquitous in this society. However, people seem to know who precisely are responsible for this state of affairs--the ruling class and their cronies. At one point in the story, the young man, kicked around by the police wants to speak to the town's Mayor. The Mayor refuses to talk to him. In a scene, the young man, lying prone on the ground because of a police attack on him, wishes he had a gun. If he had a gun, he would smash each and every person in the police department, he thinks. He would smash the government, he thinks. But he doesn't have a gun. 

The thought of the disempowered and the humiliated inevitably turn to violence, whether it be in America or in an Arab nation. But the important question is who should the gun be turned against. The guns of anger among the white males seems to be turned against the wrong target, while the anger among the folks in the story, By Fire, is pinpointed against the state.

In Angry White Men, Kimmel suggests that the average white American male's anger is the anger of a demographic that had taken its privilege for granted--the white male has occupied a position of social power by virtue of being white for years. Manufacturing has been a primary catalyst for the ascendancy of the white male in America, till the tides began to turn and manufacturing got booted out of the nation.

It's not a weakening of their gender-power that the angry white male should bemoan, says Kimmel, but the loss of the white male's class status. Women or "feminazism" hasn't triggered the average white American male's demotion from middle to fringe class; the corporations have.

The average white American man is not encouraged to immolate themselves to make a point, but in the book they are asked to be a little more discerning in identifying their enemies.

It's easy to beat up on the wife, who has suffered the same loss of class status, fallen into poverty perhaps, as her man. But it's hard to beat up on the system, because to beat up on the system would mean being unpatriotic or turning into the dreaded "Communist" which is the worst thing imaginable for a majority of the "plain" American Joes.

Does real patriotism lie in treating capitalism and its new form of ruthless profit-mongering as sacrosanct, or does real patriotism lie in rescuing the nation from the grip of such capitalism?

At the end of By Fire, the young man sets himself ablaze in front of the Mayor's office. There is a national uprising and the President flees the country. One nation, howsoever hobblingly, is on its path to freedom or a sliver of it.

The story of homelessness

Uncheerful interior, and an air of many people having recently passed through; the floors were like the insides of old suitcases, with forgotten small things in the corners. Bent window blinds; tragic, drooping, bright-green shower curtain; dark hallway opening onto two bare bedrooms. 

The above is a description of the inside of a homeless shelter in South East Bronx of New York City. 

Ian Frazier writes a heart-stopping story on the homeless of this city and as is characteristic of a New Yorker narrative, there are no discernible heroes or villains held responsible for either exacerbation or amelioration of the malaise of homelessness in what is considered to be the nation's most obscenely wealthy and consumerist cities. 

The homeless themselves become characters in a strange landscape that looks and feels like the landscape of the underworld that has no intersection whatsoever, except in the form of paternalism and policies, with the over world. 

Mayor Bloomberg is a frieze-like figure with a pair of blue eyes" that "twinkle" like those of Santa Clause's in the Coca Cola ads from the 1950s, yet says Frazier, Bloomberg is the contra-Claus person, whose eyes turn "icy" when the homeless look into them.

The best parts of the story are the scenes themselves; while on a warm Saturday night, the city itself is "hivelike, humming, fabulously lit, and rocking with low, thrilling, Daisy Buchanan-like laughter," the shelters pose a starkly contrasting picture:

More families came out, accompanied by a woman with a clipboard. People got sorted out into the right vehicles. Kids slept on people’s shoulders, except for a toddler named Jared, who was stagger-walking to and fro. He bumped against the legs of the man who was sweeping and a woman watching him picked him up and said to the sweeper, “Sorry—my bad.” Soon all the passengers were aboard, the vehicles’ doors closed, and the red tail-lights came on. Slowly the buses drove off, followed by the van. Nighttime departures and arrivals occupy the subbasement of childhood memory. The guy sweeping and the muttering man and the woman with the clipboard and the reporter taking notes existed in a strange, half-unreal state of being part of someone else’s deepest memories a lifetime from now. An orange had fallen from a bag lunch and lay beside the curb. The muttering man picked it up and looked at it and rubbed it and put it in his pocket.

The homeless according to Frazier suffer the kind of instability that exiles experience especially when they acquire the status of the fugitive and the unwanted. Yet homelessness has also morphed into an eerie form of institutionalized city-living as well:

Homelessness is a kind of internal exile that distributes people among the two hundred and thirty-six shelters around the city and keeps them moving. In this restlessness, the homeless remind me of the ghostly streaks on photos of the city from long ago, where the camera’s slow shutter speed could capture only a person’s blurry passing. Of all the homeless people who gave me their cell-phone numbers, only two—Marcus (Country) Springs and a woman I talked to briefly named Rebeca Gonzzales—could still be reached after a few weeks had passed. That their cell phones continued to work made them also photographable, and Springs’s portrait accompanies this article.

Love in time of need

A recent write up in the New Yorker, on American novelist and social activist Jack London fascinated me, because, among other things, the write up posed a poignant question in light of London's obsession with conditions of material poverty and hunger: "In the absence of money, food, heat, or other necessities, can there be love?"

This question interests me because I've been studying representations of poverty and representations of those whom we label the "poor" in texts of all kinds and in multiple discourses.

Love is rarely a part of these representations and discourses, because the conditions that inspire emotions of love are not the conditions of material wretchedness. 

Somehow, in our minds, love is associated with an above-the-poverty-line existence. That is why even when we see irrefutable evidences of love in ghettos, for instance, we dismiss and deride them as not love, but animal lust, the consequences of which are bound to be disastrous--teen age pregnancy, unwanted procreation, disease, and finally that all-American dread of dependency on the state (to feed the products of ghetto love).

But Jack London, an early representer of the American poor in fiction, thought otherwise.

Love in conditions of indigence is the theme of London's best-selling novel, The Call of the Wild. But the hero is a dog, who finds love and expresses it by closing his mouth around one of his master's hands, "so fiercely that the flesh bore the impress of his teeth for some time afterwards."

The master recognizes the (feigned) bite for a caress. 

In London's short story, "Love of Life", the bite, from a wolf, has darker insinuations.

At the end of the story, a famished man and a sick wolf lie down, side by side, exhausted after days of mutual stalking. The man, drifting in and out of consciousness, feels the wolf licking his hand, and thinks of how the wolf is exerting its last bit of energy in an effort to sink its teeth in the food it has been wanting to have for so long.

Like Plato, London perhaps reaches for a higher love, the love for one's fellow being, or a more social kind of love, that flourishes in conditions of material destitution. 

He wrote, that the "very poor can always be depended upon [as] they never turn away the hungry." 

He also implies that it is easier to love the poor back. In one of his stories, the hero is a right-wing man who has to assume the alias of a working-class man to do his fieldwork. He discovers that when he is in his alias, brawling and drinking, he is much looser, warmer, freer, and sexually richer; he abandons himself to his provisional identity forever.

Beggar farm

Filmmaker Suman Mukherjee's new political and social satire, Kangal Malsat, meaning "War Cry of the Beggars", could very well be seen as an Indian version of George Orwell's political allegory Animal Farm.

The story of Kangal Malsat: In the derelict shanties and dark alleys of Calcutta live two warring groups of the nether world. The Fyataroos have the gift of flying and the Choktars practice black magic. Suddenly, the rival groups are joined together in alliance by an ageless duo - a primordial talking crow and Begum Johnson who consorted with Job Charnock and Warren Hastings. Masterminded by the two ancient progenitors of the city and led by the magically endowed rebels, an army of tramps and vagrants launch an uprising against the Communist government of West Bengal. As skulls dance in crematoria, flying discs whiz through the sky, and a portrait of Stalin angrily admonishes the Chief Minister, the Communist government falls. The political transition, however, sees many of the rebels being rewarded with awards and positions in the new government. 

This unrelenting and bitterly sarcastic political film, based on a novel by Nabarun Bhattacharya, landed director Suman Mukhopadhyay in some trouble with the censors.

Here is a trailer of the film:

Sweet tamarind of Bastar

Is a defining feature of the rough jungle terrains of Bastar, a region in Southern Chattisgarh in the state of Madhya Pradesh in India.

Arundhati Roy inhales the tamarind that perfumes the air and looks up at the families of tamarind trees "watching over the villages, like a clutch of huge, benevolent gods." 

The villages she walks through under cover of the canopy of dense fauna are imperilled by the lurking presence of the Bastar police and special ops forces called the Salwa Judum, commissioned by the Central government of India to fight Maoist guerillas and the tribal residents of the village. The Maoists give protection to the tribals.

In Gandhi But With Guns, Roy writes of her experience touring the Maoist strongholds in Central India.

The literary quality of the writing is high, but as essayist and word Jane par excellence, Joan Didion has observed in a different context, language deceives as it is the tool of the articulate who take it upon themselves to express the truths of the inarticulate with the tool.

Language not only deceives, but it also constructs a secondary truth or reality that may be twice removed from the primary one.

Over and above being supremely articulate, Roy writes in English and translates the life-worlds of the Bastar residents and their Maoist vigilantes for a Western audience. Can English do justice to the language of the Chattisgarh tribals who speak a tongue that bear no resemblance to the major Indian languages?

Better perhaps to read this? (down below)

Satnam's Jangalnama is about the Gonds; According to the blog The Middle Stage he writes in Punjabi and revels in a

Depiction of the day-to-day life of the Gonds that Jangalnama touches its greatest heights. Satnam marvellously opens up for us the peculiar innocence, fragility and unworldliness of these people. Many Gonds, he reports, cannot count beyond the number twenty; after they reach this limit they start all over again from one, and finally add up the twenties. How then are they to imagine that around them lie mineral resources worth thousands of crores in the world market, or even to hold their own in small transactions with shopkeepers and moneylenders? Because of their indigence and ignorance, most Gonds do not live beyond the age of fifty, yet they are not particularly exerted by questions of life and death, and do not have extended rituals of mourning for those who pass away. Their sense of time is not of minutes and hours, but rather of day and night, of the coming and going of the seasons. Many have never seen a bus or a train, or any of the wonderful machines which are forged from the iron ore that is extracted from sites beneath their own feet.

What binds farmers in rural India to the working class in New Jersey?

Scarcity.

Poverty has become a convergence point for many disciplines, including the behavioral sciences.

Harvard behavioral scientists, Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir have written a new book on poverty and how it affects those who suffer under its enormous stress: Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much.

Being poor, we know, is a stressful state of being and poverty is correlated to stress-induced diseases and shorter life spans; Mullainathan and Shafir attribute to poverty something more than just stress. They claim that poverty shrinks the human brain's "bandwidth."

Simply put, if a person is poor and has to worry about where money for rent or a monthly mortgage will come from, the person's brain gets inside a hermetic "tunnel" and stays locked up there. A large chunk of the brain's bandwidth gets used up in a single task and other tasks remain unattended to. So a poor person loses the capacity to make other life-decisions effectively.

Worrying about money when it is tight captures our brains. It reduces our cognitive capacity — especially our abstract intelligence, which we use for problem-solving. It also reduces our executive control, which governs planning, impulses and willpower. The bad decisions of the poor, say the authors, are not a product of bad character or low native intelligence. They are a product of poverty itself. Your natural capability doesn’t decrease when you experience scarcity. But less of that capacity is available for use. If you put a middle-class person into a situation of scarcity, she will behave like a poor person.

Here is Eldar Shafir giving a TedEx talk on why the poor make bad decisions and choices:

A financial history of the world

Nial Ferguson's Documentary, The Ascent of Money traces the historical rise of money as the global hegemon.

This should pair well, like a thesis and an antithesis, with the animated history of poverty in the world, Poor Us (This is the second time this film finds place on my blog, but it's differently placed here, or differentially).

No beauty in American poverty

Two books on poverty in the United States are separated by 50 odd years.

Michael Harrington's The Other America, can be contextualized in the powerful words of Martin Luther King Jr.: "The Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of affluence." Back then, during the pre-civil rights era, the "Other" America would have been identified with Black America.

The American poor in Sasha Abramsky cut across color lines and the causes behind poverty are diverse and complex. 

The dictum "give them freedom and they will earn their bread" may have between the 1960s and today have morphed into "There is no freedom without bread."

Technology triumphs food

As the picture above shows, Owsley County in Kentucky is a pretty place. But like the Appalachian region, has the distinction of being the nations’ poorest county, with the lowest household income of any county in the United States.

The County is 98% white and 81% Republican. More than half of Owsley County residents live below the poverty line and depend on Food Stamps, a Federal food assistance program that was hit hard yesterday when House Republicans voted to cut it drastically.

If the House Republicans bill passes, 3.8 million Americans will relapse below the poverty line by 2014. A large chunk of Owsley residents will go hungry. 

A paradox: There is Federal Food Assistance and then there is Federal Wireless Assistance, to “empower” the poor by giving them free cell phones. Walk down the streets of the Bronx in New York City, and men and women wearing nice clothes (looking very governmental), might just accost you, like a Jehovah’s Witness, and ask if you’re on any one of the government programs, If you are then you qualify for a free cell phone and free (albeit limited) connectivity [Assurance and Safelink Wireless, are two popular providers of “free government cell phones.”].

Is one to understand then it’s mandatory to provide free connectivity to the poor, but it’s not mandatory to subsidize their basic food consumption? How odd this paradox is. I suppose it’s based on the assumption that while technology is indispensable, food isn’t.

Food Stamps=freeloading, while free connectivity=a step toward self-empowerment?

As the very Parisian Marie Antoinette said (I am paraphrasing), give the poor cakes and they'll be happy. The 21st century equivalent of the 17th century Marie Antoinette "cake" paradigm is technology.

And why isn't there an App yet for downloading Food Stamps fast?

Twenty-first century Teepees

A native American tent like the one above is being sold on Etsy for $160. You could go camping in one of these to "de-stress".

But for many tent-living is not simply a recreational interlude; it's a necessity as the video on Fresno's "tent city" shows.

I watched this video on the heels of reading Robert Neuwirth's Shadow Cities, a ethnographic study of the world's "squatter cities."

There aren't any squatters in the U.S. as codified property/ownership rights prohibit the building of homes on land that one doesn't own and have a title deed for. But on account of the recession combined with high cost of renting and foreclosures, many mow-income Americans have been forced to live inside tents on land that is in a liminal zone between being owned and not owned.

What emerges from the video is a spirit--of positivity and responsibility. Just as squatter city residents demonstrate a high degree of self-reliance, so do the residents of tent cities: they have a history, they have lives and they even double up as sanitation workers.

The woman in the video speaks of Mark Twain, who had to leave home in rural Mississippi because his parents couldn't afford to feed their children, became great in a milieu akin to that of a tent city. The woman has hopes for her son, whom she calls "brilliant," and perhaps imagines a Twain-like greatness for him.

How the world got poorer

History is usually (and cynically) seen to be the story of the winners.

The Documentary, Poor Us, tells the history of the so-called "losers."

The poor in our modern era, are unfairly, and contra-historically, considered to be the "losers". But as this film shows, the "poor" aren't losers but a by product of historical processes. 

The world, as we learn has got poorer, beginning with the proto-industrial and the industrial eras. The wise voice of Karl Marx says that the poverty we witness in the world wouldn't have happened without capitalist system of production.

A story of Bin Men

The BBC has an interesting series of Documentaries called the "Toughest Places." 

The series has "The Toughest Place to Drive a Cab," "The Toughest Place to be a Prostitute," etc.

The series focuses on the more basic professions in the world, and the "Toughest Place to be a Bin Man," is about scavengers. It's a job we rarely talk about, but without scavengers where would the shitters who live in fancy places be? I mean, as long as there are humans, there will be waste and there will be shit.

A London trash man spends 10 days in Jakarta, Indonesia to live the life, as it were, of an Indonesian trash man.

In essence, he encounters a different culture.

What's interesting about this film, is that the person who goes to the "other" place, the non-West, that is, isn't white and isn't from a privileged background in the west.

He is a black British, the son of West Indian immigrants to Britain. He makes a living by picking up trash in neighborhoods that range from the crutty council one's to the swanky. He has a truck with advanced technology and air conditioning; he has a regular pay and a pension to boot. In other words, he is secure, till the time he is sacked. 

In Jakarta all these conditions are absent for the Indonesian Bin Man, Imam, whose job the British Bin Man takes on for 10 days.

While the Documentary doesn't have the "the Western savior" attitude, it does have a bit of a glorification of the life of the British Bin Man. It's as though the British Bin Man suffers from zero insecurities and there are no challenges in his work just because it's in London. 

The Documentary does not interrogate the material conditions of the British Bin Man's life. Is he poor by London standards? 

The Indonesian Bin Man, is by contrast, poor and doomed to die as a trash collector with zero security.

The film ends on a note of pious egalitarianism, as the British bin Man, back in London, reflects on how he and his Indonesian counterpart are the "same", they are "brothers," even; it's that they are born in different places and that makes the big difference.

It's fate, as they say.

Download Yunews instead of YouTube

I like alternative views instead of carping against an established view.

Take for instance what Muhammad Yunus, the founder of Grameen Bank, the innovative microcredit lending institution, and Nobel Prize recipient, has to say about, not simply against capitalism:

The profit orientation is only one orientation of a person. The same people who are interested in profit making are also selfless. I am not saying that capitalist theory is wrong. I am saying that it has not been interpreted and practiced fully. The selfless part of human beings has not been allowed to play out. As a result, we created a concept of business based on money-centric, one-dimensional human beings. But real human beings are multidimensional.

Like the Biblical house of the Father with multiple rooms, the metaphorical house of capitalism too has multiple rooms; Yunus points out that the world thus far has focused on opening the door to just one. 

In response to a question about envisioning a world with minimal poverty, Yunus makes a connection with Science Fiction:

People dreamt of going to the moon when they couldn’t even fly. They put the idea in science fiction. People always love science fiction. Look at the popularity of TV shows like “Star Trek”; it lets you feel the sensation of going to other galaxies. Then science always followed science fiction. Although it was fiction, somehow it inspired people. So I encourage people to write social fiction: imagine society where all our present problems remain totally unknown. All the impossible things of today’s world are routine there. At this moment that society looks impossible. It seems there is no way we will ever get there. But our minds will open. If we can imagine, it will happen. If we cannot imagine, it will never happen.

Social fiction! Haven't read that many, and the one that comes closest to the genre Yunus has in mind is Indra Sinha's Animal's People.

Lastly, Yunus asks business schools to introduce an M.B.A in social business.

The orphan train

The Orphan Train

Children of the Orphan Train

The janus face of childhood is evident in the reality of the storied "Orphan train" and in the fantasy of the glorious "Polar express."

We know about the Polar express, but few remember the nightmare of the Orphan train. I didn't know about this part of New York's history, and came upon it in the context of an online discussion of Caleb Carr's excellent novel of history, memory and individual courage in the New York of the 1880s: The Alienist. 

The novel, which became a bestseller (and I hear, a deserving one at that) about 20 years ago, is credited with a recreation of 19th century New York with razor-sharp precision and fidelity to the details of the atmosphere of the city back then. 

One of the outstanding horrors of the city in the 19th century was, like it was in London of the same era, the instance of children, abandoned, exploited, neglected, abused, prostituted, unschooled. 

Thus Charles Loring Brace helped start the Children’s Aid Society in New York City in 1853. In addition to doing what it could to bring aid and comfort, food and shelter, clothes and lettering, to as many “underprivileged” children in the city as it could, the Society also did everything it could to do what at the time seemed best for abandoned children in New York: get them out of New York. It was the beginning of the storied Orphan Train, which over the next 75 years relocated a quarter of a million abandoned orphans from the slums of New York to the Midwest.

Putting the poor to sleep...

...doesn't require much.

But this lullaby is beautiful.

Orwell inverted

In George Orwell's Animal Farm, Napoleon, the totalitarian pig says "All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others." 

The Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz turns the Orwellian dictum on its head by saying that "Some Are More Unequal Than Others" in America:

While rags-to-riches stories still grip our imagination, the fact of the matter is that the life chances of a young American are more dependent on the income and wealth of his parents than in any of the other advanced countries for which there is data. There is less upward mobility — and less downward mobility from the top — even than in Europe, and we’re not just talking about Scandinavia.

He means to say that inequality, like totalitarianism (where those in positions of absolute political power assume moral superiority above the rest), is not only a moral problem for our society, but a problem of social justice as well.

Unequal distribution of wealth intersects with unequal distribution of political power, as in contemporary America, according to Stiglitz, money holds the key to political power:

The fabric of our society and democracy is suffering. The worry is that those at the top are investing their money not in real investments, in real innovations, but in political investments. Their big contributions to the presidential and Congressional campaigns are, too often, not charitable contributions. They expect, and have received, high returns from these political investments. These political investments, exemplified by those the financial institutions made, yielded far higher returns than anything else they did. The investments bought deregulation and a huge bailout — though they also brought the economy to the brink of ruin and are a source of much of our inequality.

Empathy

I have been trying to elicit a response from my students for the last few days: What is empathy? It's a concept the younger generation can't articulate beyond saying "empathy happens when you feel for another person."

In a thoughtful article ("Generation Me on Trial"), written in the wake of the suicide of Rutgers Freshman Tyler Clementi and the subsequent trial of Dharun Ravi, psychologist Jean Twenge sees empathy as an ability to put oneself in another's shoes.

Such self-transcendence, argues Twenge, is an impossible task for the current generation to achieve. "Generation Me" suffers from a severe "empathy deficit" primarily because it knows no culture outside that of consumerism, individualism, Facebook and Reality TV. 

I myself struggle to define empathy, though I believe I have experienced it now and then. Its premise is not fountains of innate kindness, but a kind of daily action based on an investment in a particular kind of equality. 

I found an example of empathic action in a recent tribute paid to Goonj, a not-for-profit organization based in India. Goonj donates clothes to the poor and the afflicted.

Empathic action is embedded in the structures and organizational principles of Goonj:

With its empathic approach to alleviation of poverty, Goonj’s stands out work in an age when business-friendly poverty approaches are attracting the lion’s share of attention. 

In being empathic, Goonj is by default nonmarket and nonmonetary in its attitude toward those who benefit from its sartorial donations.

To be conducting actions of kindness outside the perimeter of money and market creates an entrepreneurial culture where 

Those who give and those who receive are equal. From the people who give the clothes, to those who sort and pack them, to the people who receive them, the whole chain is full of respectful links. 

I understand empathy to be assistance that is given in a way that doesn't degrade the receiver of assistance.

Empathy is thus grounded on a consummate respect for the other.

It's in this context of giving and doing that I visualize the notion of empathy most vividly: You give not what you have and can spare, but what the receiver needs. Goonj often finds itself burdened with clothes donated by city dwellers that don't fit into the sartorial needs of the villager where a bulk of the receiving community is located. So, it repurposes or transforms such clothing to make them suitable for use.

It's easy to understand why my students can't talk beyond a meagre stuttering of cliched words like "feeling" and "kindness" when asked to discuss empathy.

It's no wonder...