The Enigma of Work?

Is begging work? On the face of it, this is not a question worth asking for the answer seems self-evident. Begging is seen by most as a form of inactivity that verges on the parasitic, engaged in by those either unable to perform meaningful work or by those too lazy to even try. It is by definition seen to be the opposite of work. But when we dig deeper into how we define work and what value we attach to different kinds of work, the picture is not quite as clear.

 An on-line dictionary defines work in this way- ‘ to exert oneself physically or mentally in order to do, make or accomplish something”. Those begging earn a livelihood by physically approaching every passer-by, morning and night, winter and blazing summer, clad and unclad, stooping and hobbling to ask for alms. The success rate is abysmally low and the competition is intense. New techniques need to be invented all the time, and sometimes the work/begging lines get blurred when urchins beg us to buy their newspapers and magazines at traffic crossings. The act of begging involves striving hard to make a spectacle of one’s idleness in order to draw attention to the unnaturalness of one’s situation.

 At a strictly physical level, therefore begging is a form of work. Perhaps what we mean when we argue that begging is not work is that it is not a productive form of exertion; those begging are not gainfully employed in a pursuit society finds useful. Even this argument has its weaknesses. The act of begging is certainly gainful from the point of view of the people engaging in begging. And from a societal perspective begging helps relieve the guilt experienced by the relatively affluent about their superior material status. Many religious occasions mandate that we feed the poor; unless there are poor people waiting to be fed without having ‘worked’ for it, this custom would break down. If a mendicant in religious clothes in gainfully employed for he offers us some tangible evidence of our eventual salvation, why not a mendicant in rags who makes us feel better about ourselves?

 Human beings need to give charity just as there are those who need to receive it. For a billionaire to be taken seriously today, in the hierarchy of aspirations, it has become mandatory to have graduated to becoming a philanthropist. The cause needs the money, but the person making the money also needs a cause to support to feel the elevation that the accretion and spending of money cannot buy.

 Could it be that we have defined work in terms of intentionality and appearance rather than purpose and usefulness? A person is working if he intends to and appears to. We resent begging because we cannot see the intention, and in the convention that we follow in our minds, we cannot see the physical exertion that the person begging goes through. We see it as idleness, because we already know it be so.

 At a deeper level, begging makes a mockery of the life we lead in the name of work. We resent the fact that we give our ‘hard earned’ money to someone for no reason at all. It turns our blood into water, the meaning of our life’s exertions gets dissolved in the apparent passivity of the beggar on the street. We recognize that the person begging will ‘get away’ and we resent it. It is the absence of the appearance of the trappings of work that we respond to.

 There is nothing natural and fixed about the idea of work. Tele-marketing is work in spite of being a source of intense displeasure after each encounter, being a liftman is work, in spite of adding very little incremental value to the world, being a housewife and mother, on the other gets one labeled as a ‘non-working’ person. Tellingly, a conman who collects money for a fraudulent scheme, is accused of criminality, but not of idleness, in spite of delivering negative value to the world.

 Then there is the question of the relationship between effort and reward. The harder and smarter we work, and the more useful our work to society the greater should be the reward we receive. But this is far from being universally true. The people who are assigned the task of giving up their lives for an abstract ideal called the country and who are much glorified by way of word, get paid a pittance in terms of money, while those fiddling with their screens and figuring out how to place bets on something fickle and volatile earn a fortune. Students that emerge from professional courses earn more at the start of their careers than those who have spent a lifetime in teaching these very students.

 The stock market is a good example of an arena of work where money accumulates or evaporates without the exertion of any additional effort. Overnight, an unforeseen event many countries away can turn one’s portfolio upside down. The internal logic of the market is explained by many but understood by virtually nobody, although thousands make a very lucrative career by pretending that they do.

 That so much money can be made or lost this way has over a period of time, been naturalized to such an extent that we have begun to think that this is a perfectly normal relationship between effort and reward. The strangeness of the market has got amplified in recent times with the mind boggling valuations that some start-ups command on the basis what looks like very little to the naked eye, but shocked as we are by these numbers, we still do not consider them to be ill-gotten.

 It is easy for those who make more money to believe that they have a natural right to what has come their way, for they have earned it the hard way. The truth is that nobody ‘deserves’ what they get and that there is nothing natural or intrinsic about what one’s work is worth. Or indeed on what constitutes work in the first place. The market, which makes this determination, is nothing but an implicit pact about our collective cultural priorities. Seen this way, if begging works, it is work.

 (A version of this piece has appeared earlier in the Times of India)