“But the routine of the beggars is heart-rending. The little girl who suddenly appeared at the window of my taxi, the utterly lovely smile with which she stretched out her hand, and then the extinguishing of the light when she drew it back empty. I had no Indian money yet. She fell away from the taxi as if she were sinking in water and drowning and I wanted to die. I couldn’t get her out of my mind. Yet when you give money to one, a dozen half kill themselves running after your cab. This morning one little kid hung on to the door and ran whining beside the cab in the traffic while the driver turned around and made gestures as if to beat him away. Sure, there is a well-practiced routine, an art, a theater, but a starkly necessary art of dramatizing one’s despair and awful emptiness. There was the woman who followed me three blocks sweetly murmuring something like ‘Daddy, Daddy, I am very poor’ until I finally gave her a rupee. OK, a contest, too. But she is very poor. And I have come from the West, a rich Daddy.”
–Thomas Merton, The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton (1968)