The Wells of Goodness: When Charity Becomes a Burden

 **Summer 2003**

Earlier, people drank water from rivers, ponds and, if lucky enough, got it from the wells.

Digging of a well was considered one of the greatest charitable works. So people from the trading community built sarais, dug up wells under groves of trees along country roads.

This one deed was thought to expiate thousands of little sins.

Even the wandering Banjaras, the homeless wanderers on the path of life, were not behind in this charitable deed.

Those were easy times when money was not the oxygen of life like it is now. People breathed easily. The times when pious intentions were not shackled by the monetary aspect of the matter at hand.

Whenever a son was born in a Banjara caravan, they did not move ahead before saluting the place by erecting a permanent source of quenching the thirst of travellers.

They would dig up a small well.

A pious deed indeed.

Beyond the wells and Banjaras, modern society is being pulled in the opposite directions of good deeds and bad deeds.

These are very tired, exhausted, needy days.

Need and its siblings! They glare like the second sun at you.

Then there are good people who, like little, little trees, try to provide shade to the ones lying under the merciless, scorching, baking glare of this life-sapping sun of needs.

These volunteers, driven by moral bearings and conscience, try to accommodate as many as possible under the fold of their healing and helpful shade.

But there is a limit to the number of deeds one can accommodate in the constant flow.

A good man can accommodate just a limited amount of goodness, for the unremitting threads—they become shackles after a period of time—which, over a period of time, find a man snared like a moth caught in the dangerous vice of spiderwebs.

And here the good man gets undone of the solace of his being, sticking to the fold of goodness in this ever-hurtling sea of self-interest, greed, selfishness, vices and many other negative things.

So, after a hundred good things, his resources and interests murmuring in dissent, he is forced to stand mute.

Let the wave of goodness bypass him, which makes it appear like a misdeed committed by him.

After repeated happenings of this sort, he becomes adapted to the things, becomes lethargic towards his passion, and apathy and gloom set in.

And ultimately loses himself in the sea of moral apathy.