I hate seeing beggars in any country because I don’t know how to deal with it. I can’t give every man a fish and I have no time when travelling to teach even one to fish. I feel it’s better to ignore them so they’ll find a way to deal with their own problem, and when possible to help those that are able to pass on the favour.<\/p>\n
I manage to harden my heart enough to ignore them when they tap me and show me the starving babies, but my last day in India took the challenge to a new level. I was sitting on the beach after seeing a Bollywood film in a Mumbai theatre, when three kids approached me. My camera was out, displaying my wealth to everyone on the beach and making me an obvious target. I tried to ignore them by looking through the lens at what was going on around me. I thought the beggars would try to stand in front of the camera, forcing me to look. Instead, they politely stepped out of the way whenever I moved it near them.<\/p>\n
Earlier in the day, I’d been for a walk along the beach and found a slum camp on a section of flat sand above the beach. A change in the wind brought a repulsive smell. I looked back down towards the sea and saw a line of squatting people, squeezing their bowels onto the wet sand. I guess the idea was that the sea would carry it out, but a line of dark shapes at the tide line showed that not to work.<\/p>\n
The children eventually left me alone, but were soon attacked by a stick woman who obviously thought they were begging in her territory.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I hate seeing beggars in any country because I don’t know how to deal with it. I can’t give every man a fish and I have no time when travelling to teach even one to fish. I feel it’s better to ignore them so they’ll find a way to deal with their own problem, and… Continue reading Poor<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=296"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}