There is something profoundly beautiful about the Indian idea of Seva. At its simplest, Seva means service. But that translation is almost inadequate, because service can sound transactional. We service a car. We provide customer service. We serve a client because someone, somewhere, eventually sends an invoice.
Seva is different. Seva is service without the constant mental arithmetic of return. It is helping because help is needed.
It is feeding someone without first checking whether they deserve the meal. Sitting beside someone who is lonely without wondering whether the conversation will be useful. Teaching someone who cannot afford a teacher. Carrying something for an elderly stranger. Giving time, dignity, knowledge or effort without needing applause for having done so.
Across several Indian spiritual traditions, Seva has long been understood as a way of dissolving the ego. In the Sikh tradition, perhaps its most visible expression is the langar ,the community kitchen where people sit together and eat regardless of wealth, caste, profession or social standing. Within Hindu philosophical thought, it sits naturally beside karma yoga: action performed without attachment to reward.
The underlying idea is wonderfully inconvenient. Do good, and try not to make yourself the hero of the story. Human beings have always struggled with that second part. Because somewhere along our journey into the modern world, we discovered that doing good feels wonderful.
Then we discovered that being seen doing good feels even better. And eventually somebody created a PowerPoint presentation about it.
Welcome to Corporate Seva. Today, many organisations have volunteering days, community programmes, sustainability initiatives, charitable partnerships, DEI campaigns, social-impact projects and carefully branded photographs of executives planting trees they will almost certainly never see again. There is nothing inherently wrong with any of this.
Corporate resources directed towards society can achieve enormous good. A large organisation possesses money, skills, networks and influence that can genuinely improve communities. The problem begins when service becomes theatre. When compassion receives a KPI. When volunteering becomes an entry in the annual performance review.
When employees spend three hours helping a community and four hours photographing themselves helping the community. When the company newsletter somehow manages to make the corporation the protagonist of somebody else's poverty. And perhaps most tellingly, when the same organisation that spends Friday morning talking about empathy spends Friday afternoon treating its own people without any.
That is where Seva quietly leaves the building. Because Seva is not an event. It is a way of behaving. You cannot claim to practise service once a quarter while routinely humiliating colleagues, ignoring people in difficulty, squeezing suppliers unfairly, discarding employees without dignity or treating junior staff as furniture.
You cannot plant trees for the annual report while burning people out for the quarterly report. You cannot preach compassion to society while practising indifference inside the office. Well, technically you can. We do it rather efficiently.
What troubles me even more, however, is not simply that corporations sometimes turn service into corporate theatre. It is how easily the people within them learn to participate in it. We have become extraordinarily skilled at outsourcing morality to organisations.
The company organises a charity day, therefore we feel charitable. The company has a sustainability programme, therefore we feel environmentally responsible. The company posts something inspirational about inclusion, therefore we feel inclusive.
We wear the T-shirt. We take the photograph. We tick the box. We return to our desks. And somehow our conscience receives the completion certificate. But Seva was never supposed to work like that.
The most powerful acts of service rarely require an organisation at all. They require awareness. That colleague sitting unusually quietly at lunch. The cleaner everyone walks past without learning her name. The young employee struggling but frightened to admit it. The elderly neighbour who needs groceries.
The immigrant who cannot understand a government form. The family going through financial difficulty. The friend whose life has quietly collapsed while everyone continues sending cheerful emojis into the WhatsApp group. These moments have no corporate sponsor. There is no photographer. No hashtag. No branded polo shirt. No LinkedIn post beginning with "Humbled to give back..."
There is simply another human being in front of you. And that is precisely where Seva begins. I sometimes wonder whether modern society has misunderstood kindness because we have become obsessed with scale. Corporations speak of "impact". Governments speak of "initiatives". Foundations speak of "programmes". Consultants naturally speak of "frameworks". But humanity has always survived through remarkably small gestures. A meal. A hand. A conversation. A lift home. A job recommendation. A few hours teaching somebody something you already know. A phone call to someone who has disappeared from everyone's radar.
Small acts rarely make annual reports. They make lives. And perhaps the greatest misunderstanding about Seva is the idea that it benefits only the person being served. It changes the person serving too. Genuine service rearranges our sense of importance.
Spend time with someone who possesses very little and suddenly some of our own complaints begin looking slightly ridiculous. Help someone without expecting anything back and something inside us becomes quieter. Serve people who are different from us and many of the artificial boundaries we inherited, religion, race, class, nationality, status ,begin to look exactly as artificial as they are.
Seva reminds us that humanity is not something we believe in. It is something we practise. And practice, inconveniently, requires repetition. Which brings us back to corporations. Imagine if organisations truly embraced Seva rather than merely scheduling it.
Leadership would look different. The question would no longer simply be: "How much value did this employee create for the company?" We might occasionally ask: "How much value did this company create for the human being?"
Imagine performance reviews that measured not only delivery but dignity. Imagine leaders being evaluated on the number of people they developed rather than the number of people who reported to them. Imagine restructuring programmes where compassion was treated as seriously as cost. Imagine companies recognising that the people cleaning the office, answering customer calls, moving boxes in warehouses and sitting quietly in junior roles are not "resources".
They are people. Human beings are not resources. Coal is a resource. Electricity is a resource. People are people. Somehow management vocabulary became confused somewhere around 1987 and nobody wanted to interrupt the meeting.
True Seva inside organisations would therefore be far more radical than an annual charity afternoon. It would appear in salaries. In promotions. In redundancies. In recruitment. In leadership behaviour. In how mistakes are treated. In how vulnerable employees are supported. In whether people feel safe saying, "I need help." And most importantly, it would continue when nobody was watching. Because perhaps the purest test of service is wonderfully simple: Would you still do it if nobody could ever know you had done it? No photograph. No post. No certificate. No award. No corporate video with emotional piano music quietly playing underneath.
Imagine not vuying an award to shout oput that you are a great place to work, while I reality you nurture spineless toxic people in management capacities. HHHmmm, mow where have I seen that?
Just the act. If the answer is yes, we may be getting somewhere close to Seva. India gave the world many complicated philosophies. Seva may be one of its simplest. You see someone who needs something you can give. So you give it. Not because they are Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian, Jewish, Buddhist or atheist. Not because they are Indian, British, Chinese, African or European. Not because they work for your company. Not because they might someday return the favour. Not because it will look rather good on LinkedIn.
Simply because for a brief moment, their humanity met yours. And you chose not to look away. Perhaps we do not need more corporate volunteering programmes. Perhaps we need more people who understand that service was never meant to be a box we tick.
It was meant to be a habit we live. Because the moment Seva becomes something we perform for recognition, we have already lost a little of what made it sacred. And the moment we begin practising it quietly, instinctively and without reward, something far more interesting happens.
We stop merely serving humanity. We start becoming more human ourselves.
