A new innovation is transforming many lives in the villages of India by bringing light were there used to be darkness.

The New York Times published an article titled, „Husk Power for India“. Electricity, which is prevalent in the lives of many in developed nations, is a pure luxury in remote areas of developing ones. What was once fed to animals now is used to generate electricity – rice husks.

Growing up in rural Bihar State, Manoj Sinha knew what it was like to sit in the dark. Being an engineer with Intel Corporation he had all the skills to make a life long idea come alive. He led the development of his electricity equipment that generates power from rice husks and other farming waste and now he sells it to villages across India.

Sinha is what could be called a social industrialist because he feels entrepreneurship is a way out for important problems of the society. „Business leaders must realise that the world’s poor need investments more than handouts,“ he says, adding, „these are customers, not victims.“

The article inspired me to think about giving in a different way leading me to ask myself, „what is the most effective form of giving?“ Is it education, commercial activity or disaster relief? There are so many ways to make a difference. One way of giving can seem more effective or sustainable than other ways depending on the way it is expressed, looked at or implemented.

I then came to define there were eight parts to giving as a way to look at this. So, let me map out the eight distinctions; which in effect are often ’stages‘ of giving as well.

Phase one: Exigency – salvaging and helping others who are suffering due to natural calamities, epidemic diseases or other insurmountable problems.

Stage two: Reprieve – providing reprieve from long-standing malnutrition, penury, illnesses, handicaps or inequity which otherwise would prolong or get worsened because of the lack of perception, edification or resources.

Phase three: Curing and defending – morally, bodily and spiritually. Many people carry scars that may be invisible but strongly constricting their lives. Giving the cure to release the long-standing suffering creates more chances for them while giving necessary defense gives them a feeling of security.

Stage four: Training – giving better training, knowledge and skill instruction to create empowered and practical solutions to resource creation while encouraging people to identify their singular talent to survive.

Stage five: Creative investment – lending a hand, money or resources to those who have great potential to make a difference. This gets leveraged many times as the resources increase and passed on to many others who again make more out of the opportunities given.

Stage six: Tenability – working together with the people in the local surroundings, creating tenable groups – ambience-wise and reciprocally.

Stage seven: Empowerment – empowering and inspiring the people to unleash their true potential and motivation to make a difference. In this group of giving, the aim of giving changes from ‚giving to the people who are in need‘ to ‚giving people opportunity to give to others‘ and to the community.

Phase eight: Caring – just doing whatever we want to do to cherish and care for others. No tactic or expected result exists in this phase of giving. ‚Giving‘ does not even exist here in the conventional sense of the word, as there is no sense of ownership or reasoning or yearning to alter anything. This is where we do not even have to worry about anything, we give as a part of our own delightful sense of being.

What we also find is that at each of these eight stages of giving there are different things that the giver receives.

One: Sense of relationship

Two: Sense of contentment

Three: respite from hurt (our own)

Four: Thankfulness for our own ideas, gifts and conditions

Five: Long-term sense of involvement and fulfillment for our own life

Six: Improved atmosphere for our own life and for the lives of all those we value and cherish

Seven: Soul fulfilling inspiration and dedication to our own purpose

Eight: Love

Giving has many levels and experiences depending on the giver and the receiver. And the ’stages‘ do not describe which one is more important than the other. All are necessary.

I was lucky to have an experience early in 2008 while journeying with a group of devoted entrepreneurs across India to see how we could be more productive in our helping. I was particularly happy to have one outstanding encounter that led me to think about what ‚actual giving‘ really meant.

We were in a small town one day. Four of us had just called a taxi to take us to another town in the vicinities. We bargained with the driver with care as our hotel staff had told us beforehand that we could be duped since we were not local.

We stopped in front of the local train station for a short break on the way. While the others disappeared off to use the bathroom, I started a conversation with our taxi driver standing next to the taxi. With very limited English and a full smile exposing his blackened front teeth, he told me that he had a house on the outskirts of the town and he had a young wife and two children who went to the local school – I started to feel connected to him.

I appreciated the fact of his having such a wonderful family and told him that I too had two little ones of almost the same ages as his. When the others were back the driver suddenly invited us to come to his house and have lunch. I took it only as a formality that was customary courtesy. But after taking us to the town center and leaving us there, he told us that he would wait for us until all our wandering in the town was over. And he really did. I was actually quite astonished to see him still remaining glued to the side of the road next to his taxi more than one hour later. We got into the taxi and he drove fast up the road to where he had his family.

When we reached there we were really quite taken aback to see how he was living. It was more or less similar (if not worse) to the standard of people dwelling in slums we had visited before. From the gleaming new taxi he was driving, who could have thought this

As the car turned into the narrow unsealed road between the hut-like houses that were constructed with crudely made concrete blocks and painted mud walls, we felt contrite about having agreed to his invitation. For a brief moment I felt mortified. „How could I have exploited the generosity of a man who didn’t seem to have anything and I didn’t even get any edible stuff or presents for his family“, I thought.

As we got into his house, we saw a small pot and a stove on the mud floor. His shy sweet wife smiled and blushed at the sight of visitors and vanished into the cupboard sized storeroom of the house. As I looked around, I saw the man’s neighbours giving the woman a few cups over the crumbling concrete walls. They simply didn’t have enough cups in their house. There was just a single small room that had a lone cot and an old galvanised trunk adjacent to it.

The cab driver swiftly took out three hand-woven rugs from the galvanised box and placed it neatly on the small space of the mud floor keeping one on the bed.

Hot cups of tea came pretty fast and so did some snacks. His kids as well as all the little ones in the neighbourhood came to see us and stood around near the door. All six of us were totally wedged into the small room. I asked him with surprise where all his children slept. I thought they might be having another space somewhere. To my utter surprise, he pointed the chest and happily said that it was their sleeping space.

He cheerfully informed us that he was a dancing expert of the area and pointed at the medals displayed on the recess above his bed. Bent on showing us his dancing skills he at once ran outside. From some place music started coming into the tiny room. He has no arrangement for music in the house, it was flowing in from outside. I wondered where it came from till I saw him bringing his taxi in reverse to the back wall of his house with the doors open and music flowing in from the high volume car radio!

With his dancing and the cups of tea his wife produced, time moved quickly and it was soon time to thank them for their wonderful hospitality and proceed on our way. As we got up to leave and give our thanks to him and his wife, he took the best of the rugs he had, rolled it and gave it to us. It was practically one of the handful of good things he had. It was difficult to comprehend the enormity of the gesture.

We all politely declined his gift and walked out saying goodbye to all the people waving at us. We got confused about this whole thing. Should we have given some money to the family as their life obviously looked very limited? Should we have accepted his prized gift?

As I was thinking about this life-changing experience a few days later, I thought about the refusal of his gift. He looked disappointed that we didn’t take the gift. It wasn’t just about saying no to the gift that stuck in my mind.

I realised that the sense of discomfort I felt was actually coming from perceiving him as less fortunate. I was thinking that I couldn’t possibly take anything from someone who had so little.

But did he really have nothing much? Maybe he had much more – many more.

Maybe the perfect gift we could have given him then was to accept his gift in total surrender and gratefulness.

All acts of giving and receiving are necessary for us to fill our world with abundance and fulfillment equally for both giver and receiver. We can start doing this instead of judging and justifying one over another. The pure act of giving and receiving requires no further explanation.

Manoj Sinha’s words echo in my mind once again, „these are customers, not victims.“ I can imagine the smiling faces of the villagers who are now proud to have electricity in their villages and the children who now can read books and learn in their homes at night.