Thoughts on Poverty

We saw India’s age old problems first hand: illness, disease, poverty, illiteracy, underemployment, corruption. We saw the exploitation of the weak by the strong from front row seats. We were shocked by the sight of the beggars that seemed to be everywhere. Until we had learned better it was convenient to think that these ragtag people who wandered the lanes of the market and mumbled “bakshis, swami, bakshis - alms, sir, alms” did it by choice and could have easily done something else.

What could those young mothers holding up undernourished babies done, or the lepers that thrust their hands with rotted stumps that were once their fingers in our faces. What could all those crippled and abandoned children with limbs as thick as a man’s big toe, who moved themselves around on makeshift roller boards, have done to survive other than to beg?

This was the welfare system that we would have to adjust to, the true test for new Peace Corps Volunteers, the insight that you couldn’t solve all the social problems that confronted you, something that Peace Corps training didn’t prepare you for. As a volunteer you either learned to live with your role or flew home. 

Beggars found their way to the door every day. My conscience wouldn’t let me ignore them. Some were holy men covered in ash, saffron-robed, leaning on their staffs, pilgrims wandering from temple to temple on the path to salvation. Others were crippled or blind. 

I saw that the political -isms, communism, Marxism, socialism, had their roots in the great religions and that there was a universal value in giving alms. I also realized that to be born in the privileged West and to live a life in abundance wasn’t destiny, or karma, but rather chance, who was born where and to whom was no more than a coincidence.

Inequality was a condition that I’d have to accept. I couldn’t give alms to all the needy and I’d have to find a balance that I could live with by learning to give a little more than I took.

I was visiting Bombay and after months of living on Mrs. Mani’s lentil and vegetable curries, I looked forward to an evening in the famous restaurant at the Taj Mahal Hotel. However, it turned out that my nascent sense of social awareness and my bad conscience were the wrong spices for my planned meal.

The stark contrast between India’s poor and rich was painfully obvious to me when I had to step over and around men sleeping on the marble stairs in front of the hotel’s opulent dining hall. Two attendants, dressed in spotless white livery, white turbans, matching white gloves and barefoot, opened the heavy doors leading to the dining hall, and the sea of light from its crystal chandeliers startled me as though I had inadvertently stepped into a scene from Colonial India. 

The care-free, elegantly dressed diners insensitive to the poverty on the streets outside reminded me that privilege was fleeting and arbitrary and determined by where and to whom you were born.

The year before mankind had overcome the obstacles of space flight and left their first footprints on the moon, but all these people in rags were a bigger challenge. This was humiliating poverty and you had to exempt yourself from the shame of only helping marginally and block out the guilt of being a witness to it. In the villages the poverty was different, more disguised. In the cities it was squalor.

On my way to dinner I walked through Bombay’s back alleys and side streets past families in rags with outstretched hands. Begging was not the problem, poverty was. Walking up those marble steps I saw the contrasts of India’s discarded lives scattered among its incredible riches as I stepped over that tangle of sleeping bodies covered with threadbare cloth with a thick wad of 100 rupee notes in my pocket.

I was surprised that these men let me pass to spend more money on a dinner than they could earn in several months.

Thoughts on Change

We didn’t realize at the time that we were challenging the age-old way that Indian farmers and villagers looked at their future.They saw the future as unchangeable, viewing it as a repetitive cycle dictated by the past. Subsistence farming and simple plows drawn by buffaloes or bullocks on fields that were harrowed and sown by hand would be replaced, albeit slowly, by motorized tillers and tractors.

Traditional crops such as rice and millet that people maintained were tastier, and that after threshing produced enough straw for their draft animals and cows, would be replaced with modern high yielding hybrids with heavy ears and short sturdy stalks that could support their increased weight, but consequently wouldn’t produce enough straw for fodder.

It was an inevitable spiral of change. When the bullocks and buffaloes disappeared so would the dung that they produced and was spread on the fields. The ever so important nitrogen that came from the cattle manure would have to be replaced by chemical fertilizers.

Small plots of land that had been passed from father to son would be used as collateral for loans for the more expensive seed and chemicals, loans that couldn’t be paid back if the harvest failed. Small family plots would be joined into larger farms that were more suitable for mechanization.

Modern agriculture would eventually make emigrants of people who had lived on the land for centuries, forcing them to the anonymity and squalor of the already over populated cities.