Yesterday we organized a spanish night at Seva Café!

Most of you know but in case :)... Seva Café is an experiment in generosity. It’s a restaurant that runs mostly with volunteers and offers its service without any price tag. The idea is that you cannot pay for your food. If you wish to contribute financially then you can only do it for those who come after you, and anonymously. That implies paying the food to a stranger whose face you are most likely not going to see. It’s a good start for a generosity experiment :). 

But then there is much more, the ambience, the decorations, the love the volunteers bring….It’s difficult to describe all this with words, so if you want to know more just go visit :)

It’s a magnificient space in which we experiment with a different way of understanding our relationship with people, with money, with food and with ourselves. One of the volunteers who is in Seva Café since it started 10 years ago, Bhaskar said “Seva Café is not a place, is a way of living. Seva Café doesn’t happen only here, you also bring it outside.” And after that he jokes: “Now everyones surnames me Seva Café, ‘Oh, look, there is Baskar Seva Café’. :)

Baskar is a kid who grew in one of the slums of Ahmedabad and from that though background he has flourished into a being which is cherished and celebrated by thousands of people (without exageration). He grew as a Manav Sadhna kid, a sister organization which works for the empowerment of the underpriviledged kids and families in Ahmedabad.

Today, Baskar facilitates a space which brings forward the spirit of Mahatma Gandhi in so many ways. Seva Café translates Gandhijis message to our current world with trascensdence and beauty.

In a tired world consumed by competition, isolation, misstrust and a sense of scarcity, Seva Café is a space which explores the opposite site of the spectrum: cooperation, community, trust and abundance.

Recently they told me the story of a man who entered Seva Café thinking about questioning the concept deeply. He made all kinds of questions to the volunteers. Those kind of questions which teachers make J. In a last skeptical gesture he said to the waiter in charge of his table: “I only have a 1000 thousand rupees note (much more than the normal prize of a dinner), just take whatever you consider the fair prize, I don’t want to pay much more neither much less of the real prize of whatever I have eaten”. The volunteer, nervous (he is new), shakes the head and takes some time out to think about it: “Should I calcúlate the prize of this meal and give back the fair amount? Should give him more so he feels good?” Then, in a moment of revelation, a wave of generosity overpowers the volunteer: “Why do I not give him his money back and the 200 rupees I have in my own pocket?”

This is Seva Café, a space where generosity can overflow and where there is place for the inimaginable. There is space for the human heart to express all his altruistic potential.

I always thought that we people only need trust to show the best of ourselves. The walls of this place overflows with trust in the natural tendecy from the human heart to give. Seeing what I see in Seva Café many times I ask myself: “What would happen if all over the planet we design spaces at work and a culture which is oriented to favor our own altruistic and compassive nature?

In the little orientation that volunteers get an hour before the food is served Baskar tells us: “the experiment we are doing here is about trying to treat everyone as family. The guests are our family”.

One hour and a half later that oniric thought comes true. A group of volunteers welcomes the guests with spanish songs, hugs and smiles, another group explains Seva Café concept in the tables, tells stories of the spanish culture and listens to guests stories, the cooks flow in the kitchen to prepare the delicious spanish meal and the waiters move in between the tables to bring the dishes on time. All of them volunteers, all of them novels in the art of serving in a restaurant, but all succesful in their first day.

Success in Seva Café is not measured by the money gotten, not even by the number of people who came, it’s measured by the smiles, by the positive energy shared, by the hugs, by the stories shared and the gratitude expressed. 

A lot of gratitude was expressed yesterday. A lot of gratitude that is there still today.

So that’s it, from consumption to contribution, from isolation to community, from transaction to trust and from scarcity to abundance.

Jai Jagat, Glory to the planet


Seva Café spanish night pictures and spanish article.