Kindness is a small currency that buys what nothing else can

A railway compartment between Howrah and Bandra moves through five language regions in thirty-six hours. Nobody pays for the bus-conductor’s patience with an old woman, the porter who fetches water without being asked, the stranger who shares a tiffin at lunchtime, the night-train passenger who lends his charger to a sleepless mother trying to message her son. The Dalai Lama, in many interviews over four decades of exile, has repeated a formulation he attributes to no school: ‘My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness.’ Money cannot buy any of the small mercies that hold a journey, or a city, together. Kindness is the smallest unit of moral economy — and the only currency that, oddly, appreciates as it is spent rather than depleting. The bus-conductor who is patient with one old woman finds it easier to be patient with the next.

The first surprise is that kindness is evolutionarily ancient and biologically grounded. Frans de Waal’s decades of research with bonobo and chimpanzee colonies, summarised in The Age of Empathy (2009), shows that primate societies cooperate, console and reconcile far more than they fight. Michael Tomasello’s experiments at the Max Planck Institute have repeatedly demonstrated that children as young as fourteen months will help an adult retrieve a dropped object without being prompted or rewarded, and that this prosocial behaviour appears across cultures with remarkable consistency. Brian Hare’s ‘survival of the friendliest’ thesis in The Genius of Dogs (2013) and Survival of the Friendliest (2020) argues that the human capacity for affiliation, more than aggression, explains why our lineage outlasted Neanderthals. India’s old Taittiriya Upanishad injunction atithi devo bhava — treat the guest as god — is not slogan; it is anthropology written into religious vocabulary.

The state can scale kindness, when it remembers to. Ayushman Bharat-PMJAY, since September 2018, covers more than 12 crore families with a five-lakh-rupee secondary and tertiary health insurance — institutional kindness in the form of fiscal underwriting that prevents the medical-bill-induced impoverishment which an Indian Council of Medical Research study estimated pushed 55 million Indians below the poverty line each year before its launch. The Mid-Day Meal Scheme, now Pradhan Mantri Poshan Shakti Nirman, feeds approximately 118 million children every school day; an empty stomach has never been a good listener, and the scheme’s Tamil Nadu origins in the 1960s under K Kamaraj testify to the political durability of operationalised compassion. The Patient Rights Charter of 2023 expressly enshrined dignity as part of care, requiring hospitals to display the charter and train staff. Vande Bharat coach attendants are trained on courtesy as a metric, not an afterthought. Kindness scaled is welfare; welfare without kindness is logistics that nobody returns to twice.

The hardest kindness is the kindness in conflict. The Sikh langar tradition, descended from Guru Nanak’s table at Kartarpur in the early sixteenth century, feeds strangers and rivals at the same row of mats; it does not check community before serving, and Bangla Sahib in Delhi served lakhs of meals each day during the COVID-19 lockdown without enquiring after religion. Mother Teresa’s Nirmal Hriday at Kalighat, opened in 1952, took in the dying without inquiring after their faith. India’s Operation Rahat in Yemen, between 31 March and 11 April 2015, evacuated 4,640 Indian nationals and an additional 960 foreign citizens from 41 countries — including Pakistani families — under live aerial bombardment by the Saudi-led coalition. Operation Ganga in February-March 2022 brought home 22,500 Indians from Ukraine and offered assistance to citizens of Nepal, Bangladesh and Bhutan along the way. To extend kindness to one’s enemy, or to those one has every political reason to ignore, is the highest grade; the test does not exist anywhere else.

The shadow is real. Kindness divorced from justice can patronise. The savarna village that grants Dalits a meal but not a marriage; the upper-caste NGO that hands out blankets but blocks land reform; the corporation that funds a soup kitchen while suppressing wages or busting unions — each performs kindness without restructuring the conditions that made kindness necessary. B R Ambedkar warned, in his 1936 essay Annihilation of Caste, against a compassion that left untouched the structures of exclusion: the Hindu, he wrote, may be kind to his coreligionist but the Hindu social order itself is cruelty made architectural. Kindness as substitute for rights is condescension; kindness as supplement to rights is civilisation. The distinction is not academic — it is the difference between charity and citizenship, between the donor who keeps his beneficiary grateful and the legislator who makes the beneficiary an equal.

There is a sound business case too. Studies by Adam Grant in Give and Take (2013), drawing on extensive workplace data, find that ‘givers’ outperform ‘takers’ over long careers because reputation compounds; the most successful Indian professionals consistently report mentors and patrons who extended help unasked.

The discipline, then, is to make kindness institutional without sterilising it. Train front-line staff in courtesy as a non-negotiable competence. Audit how citizens are spoken to at police stations, hospital reception desks, ration shops, post offices and passport seva kendras. Reward courtesy in performance reviews and promotion files; weight it equally with throughput. Mark Twain wrote in his notebook that ‘kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see’. A republic of laws still requires a society of kindnesses to make those laws survivable. In a country of 1.4 billion strangers, the smallest currency turns out to be the most fundamental — and the cheapest, most under-claimed reform any state can fund. Kindness costs almost nothing per transaction and compounds into the social trust on which every other institution silently relies for its working. To invest in it is the lowest-cost, highest-return reform a republic can undertake.