Condescension

Published on Sun Jun 07 2026

Meaning: to behave as if one is conscious of descending from a superior position, rank, or dignity.

Condescension is a word I learned recently. It is amazing how learning a single word can do wonders to my thinking. I don't know of a word that describes the word "condescension" in my mother tongue Malayalam. Maybe there are words but at least I never heard of it before.

What comes to your mind when you think of all the Western-funded African NGOs working hard to feed the kids in Africa? Self-sacrificing. Generous. Never does the word condescending come to your mind. Even if it ever comes to your mind, you feel guilty as if someone programmed it in your mind. I wouldn't say that every individual that is working in NGOs or funding these NGOs is "condescending" but on a macro societal level that is exactly what it is. Keep them dependent on your pennies and they'll never think of revolting.

Before you tag the West as evil, think of India. We all love freebies. Politicians love to give away "freebies". But that always ends up hurting us as a society. When politicians distribute free cash, they are essentially diverting funds from schools, infrastructure and job creation. They are also hacking the basic idea of democracy. Democracy wants the best politician to be elected, not the one who gives best freebies. Giving freebies is a way to create a dependent society and a permanent vote bank. Jayalalitha is one person who successfully executed this to gain god-level status in Tamil Nadu.

A few years ago, Mark Zuckerberg flew into India offering "free internet" to the rural areas. Modi clapped and took photos of joining hands with Zuck. So generous, right? Zuck is so selfless by helping all the poor people with no access to internet. But look closer. His Free Basics program only gave people access to Facebook and a few handpicked websites. It wasn't about empowering anyone to explore the actual web; it was about locking them into a walled garden where Facebook was the absolute gatekeeper. It is the exact same political freebie tactic. When the public realised this, they revolted. Facebook had to silently retreat. And Modi just kept quiet.

If you are from North Kerala (where I'm from), you'll see a lot of Yatheem Khanas (Arabic/Urdu word for orphanage). People donate a lot of money to it. Look closer and you'll realise that at least some of them are just a facade to bring in funds from overseas. How the existing orphanage structure hurts the kids is a whole another topic, but for another time. I'm pretty sure if you dig deep you'll find Christian missionary organisations and Hindu ashrams set up just as a facade to bring in money. When people donate to these organisations without due diligence and feel good about themselves, they are essentially becoming part of a larger fraud.

But let's go further and introspect ourselves. Are you guilty of this condescension too? Obviously no, right? We humans are generally good at judging everyone else but ourselves.

When a kid comes to you in a traffic junction you hand over a 10 rs note and feel so happy. You feel as if you changed the life of a kid. You hand over a small tip to your underpaid maid at the end of the month along with her salary and feel like you just changed her life, at the same time earning 10 times her hourly wage.

When you clean your dress closet annually, you "donate" the faded and out-of-style clothes to your apartment watchman or your poor neighbour. You pat yourself on the back for your generosity, conveniently ignoring that you are essentially using another human being as a guilt-free disposal bin for things you no longer consider good enough for yourself.

So am I saying all charity is bad? Not at all. True charity shouldn't be about maintaining dependency, be it intentionally or non-intentionally. It should be about empowering people. To be clear, there is a massive difference between an immediate crisis and systemic poverty. If a person is drowning, you don't teach them to swim. You pull them out! Emergencies require immediate relief. The problem occurs when we treat chronic, everyday reality as a permanent emergency. Of course, we don't intentionally mean to keep the people dependent, but if that is what is happening in reality, we become responsible, either because we are unaware or we just chose to skip the hard parts which is introspection or investigation. If tossing a 10 rs note to a kid on the street is keeping them on the street, or if the NGO's actions are systematically suppressing African development, that is not charity even though that might look like it. In a word, my point is to stop condescending, or probably there is a better word to it that I don't know of.

Here is one reason why this is all hard to chew. A true selfless act is about making yourself obsolete. A truly selfless charity organisation's goal is to make itself obsolete eventually, where everyone thrives without a charity. And this is a universal theory. The goal of a selfless parent is to make sure someday the child doesn't need the parent anymore. A true leader empowers the followers enough to make the leader obsolete themselves. Being like a candle is something that not every one of us can do, but moving towards it is a good enough step in my opinion.

So how do we practice this in our daily lives. It starts with changing your mindset from offering temporary relief to permanent solutions. Instead of tossing a 10 rs note to the kid at the junction, you fund an initiative that pulls them off the street into a classroom. Instead of giving your underpaid maid a 'generous' tip at the end of the month, you permanently raise her base salary to a living wage so she doesn't have to rely on your seasonal mood. Treat people as equals who deserve things, not as subordinates waiting for your charity.

If you have read so far, I might have struck some nerves probably. That is fine. I struck a lot of my own nerves while writing this. A lot of things I pat myself on the back for, are actually condescension masked as selfless act. This is just an introspective article, but I hope you could relate to at least some of these.

Originally published on jasirkt.medium.com.