Fresh angle for you on Independence Day: I took my kids to Kolkata (“Calcutta”) India. Got home today, July 4.

My fave rave professor from college, Dr. Robert Knoll, pointed his bony finger at us Freshmen, early first semester. He pronounced:

“Half your battles were won for you before you were even born, and don’t you forget it.”

Most of us didn’t begin life as urchins out on the street. Just being in college indicated our advantages. Plus we were in his “Honors” class.

And, we lived in the United States. He spent the rest of the semester revealing what all that really meant. I aspire to be just like Dr. Knoll: he challenged, provoked and stimulated his students, fired their curiosity. Every single day of his life. The mere fact that I got him as a professor was a battle won for me.

I got my first taste of Dr. Knoll’s great truth in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

In Chicago, you’ll find the occasional homeless person living under a bridge. But Sao Paulo seems to fit an entire suburb under the same bridge. (A politician might win an election just by swinging the “bridge people” vote.)

When you stretch a rubber band, it never goes back to its original size. My brain cells creaked and groaned for weeks, absorbing that experience. New cultures are hugely mind-expanding. They change you at a cellular level.

There in Brazil, Laura and I determined that if finances ever permitted, we’d make such visits a habit. So we would never forget how the other half lives.

For the last decade we’ve made that our practice.

Cuyler (“Number One Son”) was 5 months old when we went to Brazil; now he’s 13. His older sister Tannah (“Drama Queen”) is 16. They live quite comfortably in Chicago. Which could only mean one thing:

They’re old enough. Time to take ’em to the jagged edge.

Laura’s brother Alan runs a relief agency, ChildrensRelief.org. The Jagged Edge – hey man, that’s Alan’s Unique Selling Proposition. He says, “Come to Calcutta. You won’t be disappointed. I’ll hook you up with Smriti.”

In America, Calcutta is as famous for Mother Theresa’s work as anything else. And Alan’s got his own mini-version of Mother Theresa, Smriti Maiti. Her niche is the Red Light district. Trains ex-prostitutes how to sew, offering them marketplace skills and an escape from the sex trade. Also runs a school that teaches their children how to read and write.

I’d been hunting for a chance to do this for two years. Schedule didn’t work last summer, or the year before. Kids grow up fast, next year might be too late. This was NOT a convenient time, far from it – all kinds of obligations & irons in the fire, but this was too important to skip. We found our one narrow window and seized it.

I organized an Intensive in London (6-man instead of 4 this time, that’s what paid for this adventure) and bought plane tix.

Tannah’s studying French in school, so when biz was done we took a train to Paris. We grokked steel towers and Gothic buildings and dined on crepes for a couple days. (I didn’t even try to speak French, all I know how to do is butcher it.)

20 hours of airplanes and airports later, we found ourselves in India’s grittiest city.

If you enjoy driving on the left side of the street in a 40 year old yellow taxi where the driver shuts the engine off at every stoplight, horns blare nonstop, where rickety buses crammed with passengers spew soot into your window… if you enjoy a city where guys urinate on the side of the road and insistent beggars march into the street in gridlocked traffic and split test every passenger and car window… you’ll love Calcutta.

Calcutta does not disappoint. Right now it’s Monsoon season. 95% humidity, sweltering. My glasses steamed up every time we went outside.

My driver picked us up from the airport late in the afternoon. As we dodged bicycles, donkey carts and rickshaws he explained the trolleys: Regular fare is 4 Rupees (2 cents) and the Deluxe fare is 5 Rupees (2 1/2 cents).

The difference? The Deluxe fare trolley has a ceiling fan.

The first place Smriti took us was to the Kalighat temple. Home of the Hindu god Kali, the Hindu god of destruction, who is always depicted with a decapitated head in one hand. Kolkata is named in her honor.

I would not describe this temple as a happy place. More like desperate. The edge of the building where they slaughter animals and offer up blood sacrifices to Kali was not currently operating. Lots of people in trance-like states came to make their appeasements. It was about 8pm, sky was dark. Outside, vendors sold all manner of idols and paraphernalia. Other people slept on the ground or on mats.

You never rise above that which you worship.

We headed up the street into the Red Light district, a bazaar of dingy buildings, pock marked pavement, milling crowds and vendor stalls. Smriti took Tannah’s hand and I walked with Cuyler. Every block or so, Smriti would bump into someone she knew, usually a prostitute.

This being a different culture, it was not immediately obvious to me which women were “on duty”, I knew for safety’s sake that Smriti wasn’t taking us down the seedier boulevards. She vaguely alluded to what we were avoiding by not going there.

We met a lovely, slender girl. She looked about Cuyler’s age. We greeted her and she and Smriti spoke for a bit. Smriti said, “She’s recently married.” The girl seemed awfully young for that. As we walked on and later had dinner, she explained to Tannah what that actually meant.

“These women come from Bangladesh or West Bengal. They come to here and join the sex trade because of their poverty. While they’re entertaining clients in the night, their kids go out and get food and supply their moms with whatever else they need to support the business.

“The other day a woman came to me all upset, because one of her clients said, ‘I’m not attracted to you anymore. I would like to start having your daughter instead.’ Women experience this constantly, because as their young girls grow up they become more beautiful than their aging moms. This is how their young girls end up in the brothels. It’s a self-perpetuating generational cycle.

“That 13 year old married girl you met – her husband is 20-30 years older than she is. They marry young to much older men because they have no money and the men do.”

Oh, I see… he’s her sugar daddy. I guess it’s probably better to be a concubine for one man than a prostitute for many.

Smriti adds: “As these women stay involved in this work, they become very cold and hardened.”

We finish eating, buy a gift for Laura back at home and return to our hotel.

Hey…remember that ‘Half your battles were won for you before you were ever born’ thing?

Tannah suddenly GETS it. Oh yeah, baby. Half those girls’ battles were LOST for them before they were ever born. Reality snaps in place. That, along with the chaos and screeching horns and grime and dingy flats – kinda makes the stairs in the Paris Metro station that reeked of urine seem a lot less dreadful.

She Facebooks her friends at home: “If you thought the Paris Subway was filthy, you should try Kolkata.”

Elapsed time in Calcutta so far: Only four hours. Time to hit the sack – more adventures tomorrow.

Next day, Smriti picks us up and takes us to Mother Theresa’s home, the place she lived and worked until her death in ’97. From the outside, it looks like just another building in the concrete jungle. But inside, despite the open air, absence of windows and loud traffic outside, it’s serene.

The place is so clean you can eat off the floor. There’s a spot where Mother Theresa is buried, a tiny museum mostly consisting of posters and photographs, a stairway where you can see the modest room she stayed in, and her bed.

There is no admission price, nothing for sale, no trinkets, no vendors, no glo-in-the-dark bracelets, no gold crosses. It simply feels like the devoted place that the Sisters’ service to the poor has made it to be. (In other words it’s nothing like Jerusalem’s Jesus walk, which is so crowded with gypsies hawking stuff, you have to work hard to muster any sense of the sacred.)

Mother Theresa is REVERED in India. She has her critics, like everyone who dares change the world. But in a sense she’s mother of a nation. Her organization is renowned for feeding the poorest of the poor and caring for the dying til their last breath.

One of my friends saw a bumper sticker in Colorado Springs (the evangelical capital of the USA) that said “Focus on your own damn family.” Protestant Christians get a scornful eye from Americans, but Mother Theresa’s style of evangelism seems to get traction there.

I soaked up as much of that atmosphere as I could during our visit. Then off we went to the “Mud Path” school for children of poor families.

We headed into a slum in the middle of the city. Humble dwellings patched together with wood, concrete, tires and tarps. A bicycle sat in the middle of a group of homes, on top of litter and plastic bags strewn about and smeared with mud. The ground was soggy and puddled and the air was steamy. We were instructed to wear flip-flops and not ruin our regular shoes.

Smriti led us into a pristine school room, windowless, maybe 10×12 feet. Sixteen bright-eyed, well-dressed children were singing and learning their alphabet. Little boys and girls age 2-6 pressed their workbooks into our hands so we could see how they were learning their letters and numbers. If this was all you saw, you’d never guess these were the most disadvantaged kids in the poorest slum.

All smiles.

Two young men were teaching them to sing and dance and do hand motions. Smriti asked me to tell them a Bible story so I did as the young men translated. I thought to myself, “For the cost of my iPhone you could probably cover this school’s entire budget for two months.”

Smriti brought the kids brand new shoes and socks that day, which they put on excitedly. The white socks wouldn’t stay white for long, but even the poorest kids in town look splendid in clean clothes. At the end of the class they served a snack. Then after a group picture the kids all went home.

Smriti has other schools and projects. She took us to a few other sites in the city, and to her apartment where Tannah and Cuyler peppered her with questions. All too quickly our trip came to an end. Overdue projects calling us back home.

I asked Cuyler and Tannah, “Are any of your other friends as well-traveled as you?”

Tannah replies, “Well, I’ve got friends who say ‘Hey look at this cashmere sweater I got in Paris and I got this necklace in New York.’ And there’s people like the Hendricks who take cruises to the Bahamas. But geez, the Bahamas is practically the same as the United States.

“They sure don’t go to places like this,” she concludes.

If you haven’t been to the edge before, it’s a big swig to drink down. I think my kids got about as much of Calcutta as they could take.

Might I recommend that you consider your own journey to the jagged edge? If you wanna do what we did, that can likely be arranged. Smriti does take visitors. Melody {at} childrensrelief.com can tell you more, just send her an email.

However you experience such a plunge, it has a wonderful way of curing that whiny, “My Latte’s Too Foamy” attitude.

Not just for kids, but for you and me too. Think your lot in life is hard? Try raising teenage girls in the brothels. (Entitlement mentality is not restricted to people who get money from the government.)

What does this have to do with Independence Day?

I don’t know why you’re in business. I pursued my entrepreneurial path precisely because I wanted my life to include zigzags like this. I wanted to wake up in the morning and decide what to do, based on what *I* felt was important for me and my wife and kids. Based on our priorities and our values.

Not The Man.

(Or Wall Street, heaven forbid.)

You can run your business, you can delight your customers, you can catch your meetings and conferences, and still make side trips to whatever jagged edge YOU choose.

One last thought for ya:

Money is great. Lifestyle is great. Choices are great.

Foamy lattes, swanky hotel rooms with trance music in the verandas, six course meals, tiramisu with espresso, cruises to the Greek isles. All rewards for the heavy lifting of growing a business.

But if that’s ALL it’s about, it’s empty. The happiest people I know are giving themselves to some higher purpose, on a mission to make the world a better place. Usually they’re helping *someone* who can’t pay them back. Payin’ it forward instead.

I said to Smriti, “I’ve got the easy job, writing a check. You’ve got the hard job, making stuff happen over here.” She smiled at me, beaming: “No, making money is a hard job. You have a hard job. I LOVE my job. I have the best job of all.”

One of the most rewarding things I’ve experienced is meeting the Smritis of the world. There’s a lot of ’em, quietly doing their work in places like Calcutta, Nairobi and Mozambique. Just like you’re wired to build businesses, they’re wired to build communities and heal the world’s wounds.

They delight in transforming whores into seamstresses. They teach impoverished children how to read and write and love their neighbor as themselves.

They stretch dollars and rupees f-a-a-a-a-r-t-h-e-r than most of us could ever imagine. Most just need some support. They love it when well-heeled people from Europe and North America pause for a moment to find out exactly what they’re doing.

They like it when the folks who write the checks actually know what’s going on. They love knowing they’re in our thoughts and prayers.

Thank God for the battles you never had to fight. Find yourself a Smriti and pay her a visit. Take your kids along for the ride. They will never forget.

Perry Marshall