Poverty was a young boy of 4 who met me in the streets of a busy city in India begging for money. I, nearly the same age, peered at him once and then took a guilty look at my ice cream. After that I learnt the trick of gulping ice creams without batting an eyelid while a million such children of an impoverished nation looked on, eyes gleaming with desire.
Many years have passed since then. In my medical career poverty has been a constant observer. In a country without an NHS, I have seen young people unable to afford a renal transplant dying in front of my eyes. Hospital policies in the premier institutes of India in which I have worked dictated that only those with transplant prospects could have dialysis. The rest had to go elsewhere for dialysis and not all could afford it. Some sold their property to get the money. Later, when the end came, they realised that all they had left was the satisfaction of having tried.
I left India and came to a more remote hospital in Nepal, where I learnt much about the nature of poverty.
Imagine a trek to a place that is completely cut off from civilisation. There are lush green forests amid steep mountains, a self sustaining economy where people grow only as much as they need for their own consumption. No doubt it is a life of hardships, what with all the daily lugging of water, the work in the fields, the cutting of grass for the single cow in the family, the outdoor defecation, the abominable access to health care with the nearest centre being a two to three day trek away with the victim or patient on one's shoulder. Outsiders may want to reach out to embrace these “unfortunate people” and attempt to reform them. But then someone who was happy tilling his land for his bare necessities will realise how poor he is. He will become aware of many goodies waiting for him out there in a world full of city lights.
That is the birth of poverty, which stems from desire. Even famines have been shown to be man made, arising from the maldistribution of food by people who start hoarding grain through fear of difficult times. We continue to coin abusive terms—“developing world” or “socially disadvantaged”—little realising that it was our development that resulted in the relative poverty of others.
In these remote villages there is education, which, unlike ours, teaches wisdom. It teaches us to gather and grow food and to cook it if necessary. It teaches us to live harmoniously with nature instead of plundering it.
In the villages there is a system of health care—witch doctors attempt to scare diseases through various antics. Sometimes this works, but, if not, people embrace death with dignity and equanimity. If by chance people from the villages reach the world of our hospital, which lies across steep mountain passes, they are subjected to a lot of investigations that can rapidly drain their resources.
We may be proud of our cities, but are these not just concrete jungles of human misery, where the rich live in high rises and others—people who couldn't make it to the top—in slums? This, for us, is development, and we want the “developing world” to reach similar status.
I hope that these villages and all that they represent still exist somewhere, replete with lush green forests and inaccessible mountain passes.
Figure.
GERRY WHITMANT/REX
A remote Nepalese mountainous region: best left to its own devices