There has been a cold spell all over south Bengal this last week, what with overcast sky all day and occasional drizzles; the newspaper reported recently that Durgapur had become just as cold as Darjeeling (5.4 degrees celsius minimum) - which is bad for Darjeeling, if nothing else. We are looking forward to the sun rising again, as it has, weakly, late this morning. We shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth, I suppose: before you know what the terrible and never-ending summer will begin anew.
Our government at the Centre has started claiming that it has lifted 250 million people out of poverty since it came to power, that is over the last ten years, using an index quite different from that which has been traditionally used to measure poverty. Some experts have hotly contested the claim, saying this index is a much more faulty measure. I don't know what is actually happening, and in any case I am too old and know too much about economics to lay much store by these claims and counter-claims: I think only about what I see with my own eyes around me. The photograph below, which I myself took a few days ago in my own neighbourhood - an upper middle class neighbourhood dotted here and there by slums - has been bothering me:
Judging by her looks and gait, she must be at least my own age, if not a little older. Which means she was a young girl when the people's government (jonogoner sorkar) of the CPI(M) came to power in West Bengal, and got 34 years at a stretch to deliver on their promise of ameliorating poverty. And she has been living under the populist dispensations of both the Trinamul and BJP governments for over a decade. Yet she has spent all her life in slums, and she still has to work manually to collect brushwood for a fire. She has obviously been poor all her life, and that is how she will die. I have no real idea how many tens or hundreds of millions of Indians still live like that, but I have always been surrounded by them, somehow scrounging a bare subsistence all their lives and knowing nothing better, only being sold dreams at election time, and being fobbed off with pathetic handouts between elections (read Lakshmir Bhandar and all the PM-prefixed doles) which do not even pretend to solve any long-festering, endemic problem. Meanwhile, sales of luxury condos, cars, high-end phones and jewellery are booming, while organisations like Oxfam are ringing alarm bells about how extreme and cruel inequality has become all over the world.
Sorry - besides the facts that torture in police custody has been made illegal in most countries and large scale famines do not occur any more, nothing else will convince me, no technologist, economist or politician, that we live in a nice world which has been growing steadily nicer for the great mass of human beings.
I wish some of my readers will wonder, or ask, why my sympathies have always been with them, the great mass of ordinary human beings - though culturally and intellectually I am a passionate and unrepentant elitist - rather than with all the 'success' stories that the media spin out with nauseating regularity day in, day out to keep us anesthetized or intoxicated.
4 comments:
Dear Sir,
I must admit that reading this post (and seeing the picture) made me slightly poignant. I started imagining myself in your shoes, walking on the same street next to that woman in front of me, and can not help but despair at the inequality in this world which is a creation of the very societies and institutions that we are often proud about.
It may even be hard to pick up my pace and cross the woman as it would symbolically reinforce the stark differences that exist between what is often expressed as the ‘us’ and the ‘other’, where the ‘other’ is always left behind. The feeling may even make me hang my head in shame with a sense of some unreasonable guilt and blaming myself, as I am very fortunate of being at a place and point in life that many people aspire but can not reach to.
I have rarely been impressed by ‘indicators’ as they speak half-truth and do not represent what happens at the micro and meso levels. Indicators are tools created and used by actors who want to exert power and wield control to drive a certain narrative. Well, all narratives and voices have a place to express themselves; I am not denying that. But the onus on social science and humanities educators and academic researchers like us is to give platform to alternate (and marginalised) voices and build explanations that challenge the status quo.
I try to tell myself that I have to find peace with the self-assurance that as an average person of limited means and capabilities, this is perhaps the best the I can give back to society in the form of knowledge creation and dissemination on the micro-level change agency that the world needs to make lives better for everyone, and not only for a selected and privileged few. May be it is a drop in an ocean, but as you mentioned once to me a long time back, ‘the world still lives and keeps moving on because of all the good that is still there in it’.
Today I am reminded of a quotation that I read long time back in my school years. As you know, I am a forgetful man. But strangely enough, I still remember this quotation even though I read it only once:
‘So long as millions live in hunger and ignorance, I hold every man a traitor who, having been educated at their expense, pays not the least heed to them.’ (Swami Vivekananda)
With regards,
Subhanjan
Many thanks, Subhanjan. I too believe that dry theories and cold statistics will do nothing to change the world for the better: what we need is empathy. And great authors and social workers seem to be the only ones who have some genuine capacity to arouse broad social empathy with the dispossessed.
Sir
Dear Suvroda
Sadly, I feel the gap between "haves" and "have nots" have widened. Social media (and fake self promotion) have added more layers to the perception of inequality.
Regards
Tanmoy
Sir,
Every indication is that poverty is rising due to various reasons.
Many years ago, you had asked me to be careful when I introduced Hans Rosling's TED talk to you. His book is a best seller in the so called developed countries. However, books like The Divide By Jason Hickel, The Bottom Billion By Paul Collier, the Oxford Professor, The Billionaire Raj By James Crabtree, documentaries like Poverty Inc., etc., etc. all tell us a different story. Well, there must be some truth at least in what so many seemingly sane researchers are saying. So, your observations are certainly not in bad company.
Even Rutgers Bregman said this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paaen3b44XY
Sincerely,
Rajdeep
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