I resist the urge to say that I am doing volunteer work. It gives the impression that I am someone nice who devotes my time to helping the underprivileged. It is wrong, at least on the part that I am a nice person.

Sometimes I wonder if the people we help really need help. Perhaps it is our own ego that persuades us that they are the poor and the suffering and they deserve saviour like us. It serves nothing more than to build our self-esteem. Or maybe the ability to help kind of gives us the illusion that we are enjoying a comfortable level of self-sufficiency. It allows us to tell ourselves that we are not the worst of the lot; maybe we are in the pits, but there are still many others below us. And the consolation is that we are not them.

Maybe that is why we feel good helping others, because it allows us to feel good about ourselves.

And you tell me that they should be grateful for our help?

I think not.

"Praise shames me, for I secretly beg for it."
Rabindranath Tagore.

That is perhaps the reason why I do not profess to be helping my kids. I do not know who needs help, them or I, I do not know who is the helper and who is receiving aid.

On a deeper level, the role of the helped and the helper can be so easily reversed.

I see them as my partners sharing the same goal, we are equals each having a part to play in our quest for their academic excellence. Their attendance, while desired, is never compulsory. I cannot see them as people needing help, I need help as much as they do.

If my memory serves me well, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the sun overflowing with superabundance has to thank the world for accepting what it has to offer. And I am thankful that people are willing to take what I can give.

If not, it may just be that the aid I offer is unpalatable to them.

Too bad.