My rude awakening
My rude awakening
Twenty years ago I was living in India, a country that changed my life. I can’t think of any other place that has opened my eyes to so many new possibilities, experiences and ways of seeing the world. Despite all its beauty and excitement India was a disturbing place, full of contradictions. I saw a country full of pride, energy, ambition, life, but I also witnessed pain, suffering, deprivation, death. India woke me from the comfort of my Western slumber, but it was a rude awakening, an experience I will never forget.
We arrived in Delhi at night and slept in the airport. All warnings were to avoid local taxis, as the scamming of tourists was rife. Following a sleepless night we travelled into the urban madness at dawn, jet-lagged and exhausted. The bus was little more than a steel carcass on wheels, creaking and groaning around every corner. Its limitations were of no concern to the driver who took bends at alarming speed. I felt sure the bus would disintegrate at any moment, hurling the menagerie of people, luggage, and livestock onto the dusty roads. I had never seen any vehicle so crammed, as everyone appeared to be carrying the contents of their home with them. Some were.
As we raced through the choking streets the city began to stir, bodies emerging from pavements wrapped in flimsy, filthy rags. Bicycles darted in front of us, the riders oblivious to oncoming traffic. Cows wandered across roads and strolled wherever at will, the only time the bus slowed for anything. We pulled to a halt and our bags were thrown on the street, the signal we had arrived. This was somewhere, anywhere, we weren’t sure where, the crazy, frustrating, exhilarating journey had begun.
Family and friends thought we were mad. We had given up rewarding teaching jobs, good salaries, and a luxury apartment in Portugal. We were walking away from a relaxed Mediterranean lifestyle, wonderful climate, the stereo, T.V, dishwasher, mobile phone, security, prospects, all mod cons and consumer durables. They failed to realise this was what we feared most. Comfort and conformity were what we were running away from. Once the plan was set we packed boxes, flew home, and filled spare bedrooms with our limited possessions. After a string of injections, emergency dental work and further casual planning we flew East.
The question everyone kept asking was - why India? I had often asked myself the same thing and it was at the forefront of my mind as I stood by the roadside gazing in bewilderment at the insane Delhi morning.
For many of the backpacker generation India was the destination. It probably still is. Though I have matured now, become domesticated, and wouldn’t know what young travellers crave anymore. Back in the day, India topped the travel list of every post-graduate who planned a year around the world before plunging into the rat-race. It was the ultimate travel cliché, the end of the hippie-trail and the place to really be. India was the country that would ask the most questions and allow you to discover, both the country and yourself. I heard about the road to enlightenment a lot in my twenties and treated it with great scepticism. Yet travel I did, and it was the East that intrigued me most. Finally seduced we found ourselves standing by the roadside that morning waiting for our own epic saga to unfold. Something had drawn me to this bewildering and bewitching part of the world. It would reveal so much more than I ever imagined.
The thing people mentioned a lot about India was the poverty. Many asked how we would cope. I knew we wouldn’t need to. We were wealthy foreign tourists, it was the poor that had to deal with destitution. We would just dip in and out again, voyeurs, something to chalk on the list of life experiences. The poverty was something to observe or ignore, and hopefully forget. Except I didn’t ignore it, and nor could I forget. It left a huge impression, so much so I refocused my future career plans, returned to University, renewed my youthful passion to change the world. India really did change my life.
Some of the images I witnessed were the most moving and disturbing I have ever seen. Only the callous and cold hearted could fail to be horrified by the sight of a young child lying by a sewer with broken, twisted limbs begging for a few rupees. In many cases the disfigurements are inflicted by the parents. Young beggars generate more pity and revenue this way. This is the economics of poverty on the street. Something many of us have lost sight of as we have scaled Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Only the indifferent could turn their eyes away from haggard old ladies ravaged with leprosy, clinging to life as they thrust their gnarled, crumbling limbs towards you. Only the ignorant could witness the desolate, tarpaulin jungles that litter the edge of the cities populated by the faceless and forgotten, and not be moved to quiet anger and despair. This is poverty on another scale, the kind we have out-sourced to the developing world along with the sweatshops feeding our insatiable desire for cut-price goods. It’s the poverty we pretend doesn’t exist. It does, just somewhere else.
I had always known that India was a country with widespread poverty, but I had never imagined what it really meant, how it happened. For me, poverty in the ‘developing world’ was the shocking images of starvation in the famine of 1985 in Ethiopia. Poverty was an abstract, something that happened to others, something I only had to think about once in a while when the charity marathons hit the screens. Those smiling celebrities would persuade me to don the cloak of charity and absolve my guilt for another year. Poverty was isolated, sporadic, something caused by the weather, droughts, earthquakes, natural disasters. People starved because it never rained and they couldn’t grow enough food to eat. I really was that ignorant. I saw poverty as natural, a consequence of mis-fortune, an accident of birth. There but for the grace.
It was in India that a young man in his twenties found something shocking about the world, and even more disturbing about himself. India was my rude awakening.
There are more poor people in India than any other nation on earth. In a world which heralds the triumph of democracy it is worth considering that the largest democratic nation on earth fails to provide adequate food, water, housing and sanitation for a large proportion of its people. While western travellers waltz through on their fleeting journeys, the world at large is content to ignore the fact that one third of the people in the world’s second most populous nation are living way below the poverty line. There are more poor in India than the entire U.S. population. Poverty is a huge part of India, and perhaps we choose to ignore it because it is easier for us if we do. Many of us ignore poverty everywhere, even on our doorsteps, but it is far easier at a distance.
India has no major oil reserves, and despite nuclear capabilities poses little real military threat to the major world powers. It is of strategic importance in a complex geo-political area, and the tensions with neighbouring countries particularly Pakistan make it delicate flashpoint. However, this tension is isolated and contained. India cherishes its independence, and has both a nuclear power and space programme. The government choosing to pump billions into prestige not the poor. It is a country with global political ambitions to match its population and pride. However, both the Indian state and the nations of the west are content to sit back and allow many of its people to starve. At the time of my visit in the 90s despite having half the population of China, India had twice as many poor people and four times as many extremely poor. The Indian economy has grown rapidly since then, the prosperity trickling no further than the smallest percentage at the top. While we speak of the triumph of freedom and democracy around the world, we might consider that the largest democratic nation on earth fails its people in so many ways. The inequality in India is acute and growing. The democratic government is failing the majority off its people.
It is important to clarify this notion of poverty, as it is very difficult for us in the rich, industrialised North to envisage its true nature. The poverty which affects most of the world’s poor is chronic and abject. This poverty is most clearly defined in terms of malnutrition, a prolonged, debilitating form of poverty, a slow killer. Lacking anything like the necessary daily nutrition levels, protracted malnutrition weakens its victims making them vulnerable to fatal disease and illness. This is how most of the world’s poor die.
The shocking images of charity campaigns are hard for us to comprehend. Yet, they are a reality that does not represent the whole truth. The poverty of famine and disaster is most often direct, dramatic and concentrated in a region or country. Silent poverty, the real killer is far more disparate, insipid, and extreme. Perhaps it would be better for the poor if there were more media grabbing large scale famines or floods. It seems only these shocking instances make a newsworthy story. The grim truth receives far less attention. Malnutrition kills far more people than starvation, however it is less concentrated and occurs day in day out across the poor areas of the world. It is the slow, silent killer, and it is easy for the world to ignore.
Poverty is political. People do not die from malnutrition by accident or environment. They die because humanity allows this to happen. Poverty abounds with myth, but it is preventable. Ideas about weather, drought and desert wastelands only mask the truth. People do not die as a result of insufficient food production, they die because they cannot afford to buy food. The problem is access. In the case of India, at least one third of the population suffer from malnutrition, yet it is a country that is self-sufficient in food production. In the 1985 famine India donated substantial quantities of food aid to Ethiopia. A wealthy nation helping the destitute of a poor nation in need while many of its own people starve. Therein lies the contradiction. As with most countries, the right to eat in India is dependent on access and wealth alone.
The same is true of the other basic necessities of human existence such as clean water, shelter, health care and education - political and preventable. Statistics on global poverty are shameful and shocking. Half the world’s people are without adequate supplies of safe drinking water, and 80% of all sickness in the world is as a result of this. In addition, half the world live in substandard housing or are totally homeless. One third are malnourished and one in seven are chronically malnourished, in that they are unable to maintain their body weight. Nearly half the world are illiterate and 99% do not have any post-compulsory education.
Consider these figures as part of the 7 billion plus people in the world, then the extent of the poverty is staggering. Well over one billion of the people in the world live in abject poverty, without access to basic nutrition or health care. Of these, two-thirds live in the densely populated areas of South Asia, of which India is a major part. The average income per person in India is $1,500 per year. Hundreds of millions of people have incomes far below this figure. Around 60% of the population live on less than $4 per day.
In 2016 Oxfam reported that the 62 richest people in the world owned the same combined wealth as half of the world’s poorest. The richest 1% own more than the rest of the world in total. Since 2010, the report said, the wealth of the poorest people has declined by 41% and the wealth of these 62 richest people has gone up to $1.76 trillion. Of these 62 people, four are Indians. India is the second most unequal country in the world with the top one per cent of the population owning nearly 60% of the total wealth.
These statistics in themselves are damning enough, yet put in more crude terms they become even more indefensible. Every 10 seconds somewhere in the world a child dies as a result of malnutrition. That’s 360 every hour, over 8,600 every day, 3.2 million every year. That is the equivalent of the population of Seattle. Yet the world produces more than enough food to feed these children and enough income to nourish them, but due to the uneven distribution of wealth and their lack of access to food on the basis of wealth, neither their families nor their states can afford to feed them. These children die as a result of poverty which is caused by man and can be solved by man. Finally, the most morally shameful statistic of all is in the same ten seconds these children die the world spends over $530,000 on military forces. This represents a thousandth of the amount that would save a child’s life.
This was my rude awakening. If India is the world’s largest democracy what did its poverty and acute, growing inequality say about the credibility of the liberal democratic experiment and the era of globalisation. Of course, this is not just an Indian problem, it simply highlighted a much wider problem. Poverty and inequality are global, a symptom of globalisation which far from being the path to greater prosperity is a key part of the problem. The promised riches only trickle to some, the smallest minority at the top. Globalisation and liberalisation are failing. The reasons why I will leave for another discussion.
2016 has been a year of turmoil and dramatic change. We are entering an era of instability and uncertainty. Many questions are being asked about what went wrong, what is still going wrong, and how we fix it. These crises come in waves, no doubt a sticking plaster will be found, at least until next time. The poorest are being made to pay for the crimes of the rich, and the arrogance and mis-management of the political classes. The poorest with a voice are biting back.
The events of the past year drew me back to my travels many years ago. Reflecting back on my time in India I felt we should have seen this coming. Many did, but few listened. India helped me found so much about myself, it answered many questions, but left me with a good many more. One was the most important question of all, the one we don’t ask enough - is this the kind of world we want to live in? I still ask myself the same question twenty years on. I still find myself reaching the same conclusion. I wanted to change the world, I am seeking answers instead. We can be better than this. We have to be.
