Unusual friends - Beggars

Continued.. Number 8 of Indefinite series.

Now beggars are a world apart. Anyone who finds oneself without resources and has to ask for assistance needs all the help they can get. I must admit that I don't have any friends in this group, but several people I know may have been close to this state in the past. And I do know some interesting stories about them.

One of my great grand fathers is known to have a belief that if a beggar was the first person you saw on waking up in the morning, then it was a positive sign for the rest of the day. So much so that he hired a beggar to come every day and stand at the top of his bed in the mornings for this to happen. I imagine he slept alone and out in the open.
When Marisol first went with me to India, she was not so keen on the begging, but once a boy appeared in a traffic jam, with a religious 'figure', asking for a donation to Shani Devta. It was a dirty little pot with some water in it, with a metal cutout of a small figure which presumably represented Shani. The story according to our taxi driver was that all those who looked Shani in the eye were supposed to have misfortune. So you had to look at a reflection of the figure in the water (hence the pot with the water). Of course, Marisol wanted to buy the whole religious arrangement, which the boy was reluctant to let go! It was his business, and without it he had nothing to obtain a donation. In the end enough money changed hands and we had this rusting cutout (without the bowl) hanging around our living room for a while. As to the bad luck we did not worry because the cutout did not really have any eyes.

The first time I went to Silicon Valley, California, to present some work at a conference, it was 1995, and USA was miles ahead of any other part of the world in Computer technologies, and I was very impressed to find that all adverts in US newspapers for employment came with a contact email instead of the customary address and telephone number in England. I was not really looking for jobs so much as comparing salaries and who was hiring, honest. So to get back to begging, imagine my surprise when I came across a man sitting on a side walk in San Jose, with a bowl and the customary cardboard with a message. I was shocked since this was the gold rush place, everyone working on computers and never heard of poverty. I got a little nearer and read the message and it said: 

'Help me out or give me a job, I can design you a computer.'

Another time again someone in my family told me that begging was big business and an organised occupation. A women who sat at the same place every day to beg in Connaught Place (now known as Rajiv Chowk in a fit of nationalist fervour for renaming old colonial places) in Delhi was known to arrive in a car every morning and the same car would pick her up at closing time.

I did not believe this for a minute until I read in the news about a beggar who appeared at the window of a car at a traffic light as usual in Delhi. When the lady driver said she had no cash, he pulled out one of those card charging portable terminals and said 'Its OK, you can pay by card.'

Here in Laredo also we have a couple of people who regularly occupy strategic places to seek help from people passing by. Recently I was parked by one of these places, and the man arrived, placed his equipment on the ground, took a chair from a nearby bar and began to set out his pitch. Then he pulled out his mobile phone made a call. Then to my surprise he pulled out his wallet and went to a nearby Cash Machine and got some money out of his bank account, before making himself comfortable on his chair.

Begging is not what it used to be..