Elitist Responses towards Squalor: Genuine or Makeshift

India in the last two decades or so have achieved remarkable numbers. These numbers, the economists, keep referring to quite frequently, are nothing but year on year increases in the standardized measures of a country's economic progress. Ideally, the effect of these numbers should have percolated down to everyone. However, ironically, they have had asymmetric impacts on the lives and livelihoods on different sections of the country's population. While they have led to insurmountable delectation of the elites and, thereby, enabled them to strut around, they have touched the lives of the people living at the middle and bottom of the pyramid only partially. These gets reflected in the downward slide of the so-called "Poverty lines" estimated by the various committees set up the Government at various points of time. Even though the accuracy of these numbers have been extensively debated in the public domain, there is no denying that the number of the poor and oppressed of the country have come down over time (however small that decline in poverty may be). Significantly enough, a sizable proportion of the population still do not have access to two square meals a day.


The reaction and response of India's affluent class towards this asymmetry is worth mentioning. Few questions which keep creeping up in my mind time and again related to this issue are penned down below for the readers of this blog to ponder upon-

• Does an affluent citizen actually understands that he/she belong to a select class of people and that many who may be similar to him/her (in terms of age, community, physical features....for that matter "whatever") do not have similar accesses?
• Let's assume that the affluent class does understand the plight and despair of the poor. But they do actually care for it?
• When an affluent sympathizes with the gloom and doom of the poor, the point to deliberate upon is whether he/she is genuinely doing it or just trying a makeshift appearance?
• Does he know how it feels to get up early in the morning and run towards the fields looking for a bush to hide his/her act of open defecation?
• Does he know how it feels when one kilogram of rice is shared by 10 members of a family with mere salt (not sugar, sugar is currently being sold at Rs.32 in the market)? Does he know how it feels when one has to forget that there is something called 'Supper'?
• Does he know how it feels to slog in the fields for 8-10 hours under scorching sun?
• Does he know how it feels to bring a pale of water by walking half a kilometre? (let me apprise the affluent that this is not the nursery rhyme of "Jack and Jill')
• Does he know how it feels when a family member embraces death (while being on the way to take the concerned member to the nearby dispensary situated at least 4-5 kilometres away)

Just shedding crocodile tears is perhaps neither necessary nor sufficient to understand the real trauma of the poor. The affluent, at some point in their lives, should undertake a sojourn to a place absent of the colours present in their lives. Only then can they understand how it feels not to have accesses !!!!