When service means changing lives

Social work has often been taken as a synonym for social welfare. However, the term social welfare has a very loose meaning, and may mean different things in different jurisdictions in the world. For instance, individuals and institutions that help the poor, the handicapped, the diseased and those affected by a calamity or disaster by organizing volunteers, or by providing the needed money or materials, are generally looked upon as doing great social service. This perception, while not entirely wrong, is dangerously incomplete. It mistakes the bandage for the cure. However, one feels truly amazed when one finds that such other individuals and institutions as are sincerely and honestly devoted to the great task of final eradication of poverty, disease and crime from the society but whose mode of work is such as does not require the distribution of money or materials are not regarded as institutions of social service.

Those who react to such institutions with apathy, indifference or lack of appreciation, fail to realize that the relief measures taken to provide food, clothes, money, medicine or materials, however important, are but only adhoc measures and that these methods of service touch only the tip of the iceberg or only a small fringe of the vast populace and deal with only the surface symptoms. We have been conditioned to equate visibility with value.

A truck unloading grain sacks makes the news. However, a teacher quietly rewiring a child’s relationship with anger does not. But twenty years later, it is the second intervention that has actually moved the needle. For the former measures, however well-intentioned, do not finally rid the society of poverty or disease or the tendency to commit crimes, nor do they attempt to prevent thesuffering at its source. In other words, these people lack a proper perspective; they take only a short-term, gross and surface-view of things. And yet, institutions that work on this mind-body continuum are still not counted among the ranks of serious social service organisations. Likewise, it is not known to many that most of the crime is due to tension or criminal tendencies and that even poverty is due to economic exploitation by the rich, apathy of the society for the less privileged and sloth of the poor and, so, all these can be eradicated by a system of spiritual-social education which strikes at the roots of these problems. To put it simply, if you want to reduce theft, you can either build more jails or build better human beings. One is expensive, recurring and ultimately futile. The other is slow, invisible and permanently transformative. Unfortunately, society keeps choosing the former because it is easier to count cells than to measure character.

If facts and figures had been published to give people the awareness that the ancient technique of Yoga education gives hundred-and-one benefits simultaneously and better and cheaper than any other mode of service, importance of social work done by institutions teaching meditation would never be under-rated. On the other hand, their work will be considered as socialservice par excellence. The need of the hour, therefore, is a fundamental shift in how we define, measure and reward social work. Relief is necessary, no one argues otherwise. But relief without reform is a treadmill. True social service is not what makes suffering bearable. It is what makes suffering unnecessary. So, until we learn to honour the work that prevents the wound, we will forever remain busy dressing it.

(Writer is a spiritual educator and popular columnist for publications across India, USA, UK, Australia, South Africa, Canada & Mauritius. 9900+ Published Columns have been written by Him.)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rajyogi Brahma Kumar Nikunj Ji

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