Bernard Shaw once said, “The worst of our crimes is Poverty.” This was a few decades ago, and yet, it is so applicable to all of us. I say this now, in the context of the local Indian culture, society and norms.
Hear me out before you flame. I do admit that most Indians are poor and desperate. They have no hope for a better life in the near future. They have no opportunities for education (no, this is not going to turn into one of my pro-reservation rants). They have no opportunities for any respect or better treatment. And I have all the sympathy for them. Now that I’ve put in this rather detailed disclaimer, these aren’t the people I’m talking about (and neither was Bernard Shaw.)
Poverty , for those who don’t have to face it, is full of romanticism and nobility. It somehow propels the most worthless loser on earth to some kind of holy self-less Jedi-Knight level (perhaps the same way I claim to want to be a Jedi so long as I don’t have to endure their hardships daily). No, this isn’t the typical “be happy with what you have because there are people poorer than you” crap either! And for the record – I hate that kinda crap.
This is about how we choose poverty to escape responsibility and accountability. This is about how we use poverty as an excuse to do what we want while feigning helplessness. This is about transforming poverty into a heroic virtue, and pretending it has been chosen to avoid the struggle to escape it.
Let me begin by a controversial claim, and one that gets most of my friends mad when I make it – India has never really faced severe hardship due to natural causes and that this has made us a very complacent society. We have natural resources, tropical climate where plenty of food is available, temperate climate, and a rich forest. Alright alright, so we need people to actually go and farm, but there’s not been much to complain of naturally. It’s not like we were in the middle of a desert, or a place that’s buried in snow half the year. There have been places that faced inevitable hardships and problems – where people had to work together to avoid extinction, not just inconvenience. Indians on the other hand have always faced artificial hardships – 99% of them caused by the then-rulers, whoever they may be. In other cultures, there would be mass revolts, but we just keep on whining and do nothing. And the reason, in my opinion, is plain and simple – there really is nothing we faced more than a minor inconvenience. If someone goes into examples of farmers in Maharashtra committing suicide – they’ll be proving my point – a few deaths really don’t matter to us, which is why we’re so complacent and smug to discuss this in civilized society to appear concerned but do nothing beyond that. Those farmers dying is, at best, a minor inconvenience for the rest of us because now we need to appear to be concerned in our next social outing and waste a few moments talking about it.
The effects of this complacency are seen throughout our culture – we’ve always idolized artificial challenges – our great Sadhus fasted for a thousand years which makes sense in a society where food was plentiful. The same would be called idiots in places where the daily survival was to find food to get through that day, and instead their heroes would be those who struggled to gather food and perhaps feed a couple of mouths more. Whenever someone talks about problems in India, we snap back, “We invented the zero.” A phrase that makes me proud of whoever invented the zero a thousand years ago, and then equally ashamed of the 200 generations in between who didn’t use it until the Europeans told us to (if you’ve read my previous entries you’ll know the one thing I demand above all is responsibility and accountability – if we’re responsible for inventing the zero, we’re accountable for not having used it.) Here again, we find that being able to do tabular arithmetic due to the decimal system was valuable where resources were scant and they needed to be managed efficiently. Let’s face it, India’s illiteracy is as much voluntary as it is due to circumstances. I’ve lived in a rural village all my childhood and people looked down upon us “educated”-types who were thought to be wasting their lives by studying. Here again we see that education is really a previledge and not a necessity.
I’ll come to the point now – is poverty a choice we’ve made to allow us to be lazy, and complacent and irresponsible and unaccountable? I’ll leave that as an open question for you and will give some points to think about.
India is not a poor country by any means. Poor countries demonstrate need. The US is a poor country – I feel sorry for them. They have problems like the recession, and they discuss those problems, they face them, and they ask for help. They take steps to fix the problems. That’s the evidence of being poor. If you’re wondering whether Indians discuss and face these problems or whether we live in denial, you’ll get your answer in the responses to this post. We have 3% population that pays income tax, and those 3% are called “stupid” for not being able to evade taxes – what’s worse is that those 3% are also the ones who lose out in every red-taped procedure. Those 3% rich people offset the costs for servicing the “poor people” with black money who get instant services (I would be happy to arrange a demonstration for the skeptics, at their leisure.) Meaning, those 3% like me are stinking rich who’ve supporting our poor below-poverty-line minsters who can’t make a decent living.
We go around claiming we’re a “poor country” and hence don’t have money for academic research (or any research for that matter.) Look closely though and you find that it’s a choice we’ve made. I don’t blame us for not wanting to do it – research is hard and thankless work, but have the guts to say we’re lazy. Don’t blame it on lack of resources.
One of the most visible (and admittedly not very critical) examples is IIT Mumbai’s is sky bridge in their gents’ hostel. Sure, it looks impressive, but playing table-tennis on a sky-bridge 100-feel-high, in my opinion (the great IIT scientists may disagree), adds no academic value to the country whatsoever. That money could have funded thousands of research projects in thousands of institutions all over the country. A “poor” society, is by definition, a utilitarian one. It is supposed to divert every single resource to satisfy a “need” before allocating them to a “nice-to-have” feature. Isn’t this the same institution that claims they don’t get enough teachers
On a larger scale, the entire educational system is filled with reservations – no, not for the lower-castes, for the institutions. We fund Rs. 700 crore per-year-per-IIM, and Rs. 500 crore per-year-per-IIT – in the same breath we are proud of all pass-outs being hired outside the country. This is reservation – a non-competitive market – if you’re in the “IIM” caste, you’re given a free ride. A grant without accountability and without responsibility. (This isn’t an anti-IIM rant but those are the big numbers – there are hundreds of universities/colleges the government funds without any accountability whatsoever.) If the UGC instead declared that every year they’ll allocate this 700 crore to any management institution based on a competitive criteria – heck I’ll allow the IIMs to define that criteria – but once defined, it should be immutable. Let other institutions in the game – let the IIMs have the possibility of losing those funds for one year. If they’re so good, they won’t mind. In a “poor country” funds are competitively allocated where they bring back maximum benefit. Still want to claim we’re poor?
All in all, we as a society, have turned into whiners. Poverty allows us to escape/justify whatever faults people find in us. Can’t do research? We’re poor. Can’t pay taxes? Taxes are for the rich, even our ministers are on welfare here.
Can anyone deny that poverty is the biggest crime we’re all guilty of?
