ASIAN RECONNAISSANCE

The huge set-piece meetings, with platform speeches tediously relayed to the back of the throng by a chain of interpreters, struck Buchman as largely ineffective. It was 'like hunting rabbits with a brass band', he said. What was needed, he insisted, was 'personalised work', detailed dealing with the moral and spiritual needs of individual people, and definite decisions. 'We must simply rivet, rivet, rivet from the very first moment,' he wrote to E. C. Carter, the Joint General Secretary of the YMCA's National Council for India and Ceylon. 'Every leader must be permeated with this idea, and be incisive in his addresses and personal dealings. We need to study each man.'3

His ardour was fuelled by what he considered the ineffectiveness of the YMCA Secretaries he came across in city after city. As it seemed to him, many were religious bureaucrats whose energies were absorbed by administration. 'The Christian workers in India need to be taught the "how" of Christian service,' he wrote to Mott in November. 'There are agencies abundant and many Christian workers, but they do not seem to get into close, vital touch with the people ….. There is an utter lack of consciousness everywhere of the need of individually dealing with men.'4

'The danger', he wrote to Eddy in a later letter, 'is, we do not know our Secretaries. The International Committee think they know, but to be absolutely frank, they do not.… We depend on hostels, organisation. We must go deeper. Otherwise, we will develop a constituency of parasites.

'Some do not even know how to deal with a man who has the simplest needs. Three Indian Secretaries worked side by side with one American. The problem of one of these men was dishonesty. The Indians knew about it. The community knew about it, and, most of all, the man himself knew about it. But no one seemed to know how to cure the dishonesty and make it the stepping-stone to a life of power. A simple twenty minutes changed the whole tenor of his life.' Buchman enclosed a letter from the man to illustrate the story.5 His own eighteen-page letter gave many other instances of how he had found himself dealing with the same elementary moral problems as in Penn State and other American colleges. He also found in many the same need which Meyer had revealed to him in himself at Penn State - fruitless activism operating an unproductive organisation.

Some of Buchman's colleagues no doubt found this sort of criticism irritating, implying as it did that they had been missing the point.

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