Kindness is a butterfly

Kindness and compassion have become social media buzzwords. Businesses and brands are trying hard to project an exterior of empathy and pushing these catchwords to customers keen to put their money where it makes a difference.

When he was 18, Mayank Banerjee, the young CEO of a Bengaluru-based healthcare startup, went hitchhiking from China to France. Couchsurfing his way across continents for six months, he lived almost entirely on the generosity and kindness of strangers. Fast forward to a few years later. When the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic hit India hard, psychologist Divya Srivastava and her team at her wellness centre fielded calls and created free support groups for those who had found their lives upended by a ravaging pandemic. In 2020, friends Krithika and Ruchika started a sustainable, gender-fluid clothing and lifestyle brand that works to empower artisans across India. You might think these three entrepreneurs from different fields have nothing in common. But across industries and spread across time, all of them are connected by the intrinsic, intangible value of kindness.

In 2023, as the world slips bleary-eyed and confused into another year, seemingly unable to shake off a nagging virus, kindness and compassion have become trendy buzzwords. With the fallout of the Great Resignation, businesses and brands are trying hard to project an exterior of empathy, showcasing their values to jaded employees and pushing catchwords of kindness, sustainability, and fair trade to customers keen to put their money where it makes a difference.

Is it really a choice?

But therein lurks the danger. Is kindness becoming another greeting card, a value exploited for commerce, and sinking into gratitude journals that fly off e-commerce carts? Nirmala Peters Mehendale, a trustee of Kindness Unlimited, doesn’t think so. “I am hopeful and find a section of young people have begun to realise that they have no choice but to be kind to themselves, others, and the environment.” Kindness Unlimited is a non-profit that works toward unifying Indians through acts of kindness. Over the last 16 years, Nirmala and her team have organised multiple projects on the importance of compassion in our daily lives. Nirmala says that she was drawn to kindness as a movement when she observed both people she knew and strangers becoming indifferent to the pain of others. No surprise then that Nirmala’s LinkedIn profile has trust and compassion as keywords in the heading! Vaibhav Tewari, the genial CEO of one of India’s biggest healthcare startups, agrees with Nirmala. “This is not a passing fad. Focus can come and go, but the importance of being kind is always very high. Kindness is the core for human beings to qualify as humans. Without kindness, the basic tenet of humanity will be missing,” he says. During the height of the second wave, his start-up stepped in with free oxygen concentrators at home for those who needed supplementary oxygen.

Startups are often associated with harsh numbers: revenue, growth, sales, net profit, and cash flow. We have SharkTank, but KindnessTank anyone? Can something like kindness fit in the hustle world of startups? Both Mayank, the former hitchhiker and current co-founder of the healthcare start-up, and Vaibhav, believe that kindness is definitely a value that businesses can aspire to. “Our ethos is driven by compassion and empathy,” says Vaibhav. Mayank conducted mini-vaccination drives during the pandemic and health check-ups for next to nothing. “We lost a bit of money doing that, but we helped about 20,000 people during the pandemic,” says Mayank. And it wasn’t an act that went unnoticed because, as Mayank explains, when his start-up went live, their customers trusted them a bit more. “Our business is about, in the long run, trust. Kindness pays it forward.”

Social media surge

Businesses have noticed. There has been a surge in the number of kindness campaigns from brands. On Instagram, hashtags like #bekind, #kindness, and #compassion trend often, reaching peaks on World Kindness Day, celebrated on November 13 every year as part of the World Kindness Movement. The objective of the day, the World Kindness Movement explains, is to “highlight good deeds in the community, focusing on the positive power and the common thread of kindness that binds us.” And studies show that there is indeed enormous positive power in kindness.

Clinical psychologist and the head of the Department of Mental Health and Behavioral Sciences at a multi-speciality hospital, Kamna Chhibber, says that kindness ensures that people feel supported in moments of difficulty and distress. “With kindness, people can build a realistic understanding of themselves and perspective on the problems they may be experiencing,” she explains. “It leads to a sense of positivity and creates joy and happiness. Kindness enables one to maintain an optimistic view of people, the world, and how the future can unfold. These multiple elements positively impact and influence moods and lead to a reduction in self-evaluations and anxiousness or worrying.”

Divya Srivastava, who has more than a decade of experience in mental health, adds that many studies show that unlocking kindness is the key to unlocking happiness too. “I remember, in particular, a survey from 2019 showed that your index of happiness increases if you do just seven days of ‘a kind deed every day’. Kindness also increases your self-esteem. When you think that you made a positive contribution to someone else, your self-esteem rises.” The pandemic definitely contributed to an upsurge in this interest in kindness. Covid-19 stripped us of pretences, and the heightened levels of anxiety led to increased vulnerability. Repeated lockdowns forced people to seek out more connections. For her clients, Divya recommends a three-pronged approach to kindness, focusing not just on personal and professional areas but also on self-compassion. “I feel when you talk about kindness, it’s important to be kind to others but also to remember that you are human, too. You also deserve it.”

And Divya believes that we have Gen Z to thank for this interest in kindness, as she finds this generation is creating a culture that places a premium on being valued.

Tilting on a kinder axis?

A global Gen Z research study found that the three top values for Gen Z are: honesty, kindness, and fairness. There are young folks like Ankit Narasimhan, who started a mental health podcast before he turned 25, and who says that kindness for him is a “fine balance between showing up for the people you care about and not disregarding yourself.” Then, there’s Geena Bharwani, who graduated in 2021 and started The Kind Nook the same year to remind people across social media platforms that kindness is not a thing of the past. “I came up with the term ‘“Kindcident”’ (a kind incident) and requested people to submit their stories on little acts of kindness. These incidents could be anything, right from being kind toward themselves or whether it was something that was done for them by a random person or even their loved one.”

Meanwhile, Krithika and Ruchika’s gender-fluid clothing brand has a tagline that boldly says: ‘Kindness is around us’.

“Kindness fits in our message and is a motivation for us personally as well. When we use the word kindness, it is a very large term that encapsulates all the hands and materials that goes into our work. Our goal is to be kinder to the people and the planet,” the founders aver.

Or is it just a convenient trope?

While all this might seem like the world is tilting on a kinder axis, not everyone is buying into this movement. Sheba Devaraj, the founder of a fitness studio in Chennai, feels that kindness, like self-love, is sometimes overrated and misunderstood. “We sometimes “manipulate” the real meaning of kindness to suit what we feel at that moment,” she adds. But despite that, she admits that kindness does come with a feel-good factor that is hard to ignore.

Zamrooda Khanday, who runs a for-profit social kindness platform, bristles that kindness is not a lost concept. The platform offers a unique space: one where people feel good about sharing their kind deeds without fear of being judged. “We want sharing of kind deeds on our platform to become like sharing of pictures on Instagram. We aim to change the mindset that we should not brag/tell people about the kind of things we do. We believe in sharing, for the more you share, the more it spreads,” Zamrooda explains.

And kindness definitely seems to be spreading. There are more than 35 kindness podcasts globally, generating 1000s of minutes of kindness notes weekly. Life University even offers a Compassionate Integrity Course complete with a certificate of ‘kindness.’ Instagram pulls up more than 12,904,931 posts for #kindness. Perhaps, we are really riding a new wave of kindness. A new wave that carries with it the wisdom of the old. Centuries ago, Wolfgang Goethe wrote that “kindness is the golden chain by which society is bound together.” Goethe’s world doesn’t exist anymore, but his words are more alive now than ever before. It’s really cool to be kind.