The Mining of Poverty

Title: The Mining of Poverty
Type: Socio-Political-Economic Analysis

Abstract:
“First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, and then you win.” by Mahatma Gandhi


It is not NEWS that the believers of the ‗divine right‘ from the West as well as the pseudo-democratic champions of the East have both been abusing the rights and minority interests of the vulnerable for a very long period of time; yet, it must be realized that the impact thus created, has been quite severe on skewing the identity of the majority living within the barriers of geographical restrictions who end up bearing misrepresentations and its subsequent consequences.

Our resistance (as Indians) to global disparities and dialectics of internal and external identities that have emerged as a result of these causes has not altered as the majority still live in a state of complacency of ignorance; if not, apathy. Resistance to forced identities has remained unrevoked and the Indian identity that has been skewed on the parallel to favour some hypocritical agendas set forth by funding and funded organizations in the development sector, can be only set right upon the realization of the fact that this plunder and ruin have been silently and systematically hatched, patched and dispatched, ignoring the identity of the majority and of course, with a certain level of deliberated resistance towards this wrongful depiction and misrepresentation.

The following analysis at a socio-political-economic level, aims to disturb the complacency of silence in order to stop manifesting what necessarily does not represent the identity of every Indian and calls for rudimentary, majority response for its reversal.

Sample:
The Mining of Poverty
“The identity of an individual is essentially a function of his/her choices, rather than the discovery of an immutable attribute.” Amartya Sen

India has always been seen as a land of harvest if not by us, at least by the West. As we try to think that gone are those days, when the great whites packed up after reaching our shores and mining us off our riches that they controlled, reaped and shipped to their land to be preserved, wrapped and sold, it is equally pertinent to be a little watchful and realize that today those we believed to be gone, are back in our shores and this time, to mine us off our poverty instead. Their first stop often as they reach our land are the slums, pavements and areas of claimed-underdevelopment, poverty and hunger-their choicest destinations (often with good connectivity through air), where they pull out their point and shoot cameras, to do exactly what it is meant to do-point and shoot-megapixel after megapixel of great whites amidst the poor, vulnerable and unprotected lot in an impoverished nation that will soon get captioned, tagged, uploaded, downloaded and blown up to unimaginable proportions to be presented in slides, posters, brochures, coffee-table stand-alone and anything creative and unimaginable during hair-raising, fund-raising campaigns to a bunch of mesmerized audiences who fill the high-raised bowls of those that seek on behalf of those who are not even aware (nor ever will be.) Thus emerges a breeding ground for forced-need-based communities and strategic-greed-based organizations and the marriage of these two groups have become subsequently complementary for each other‘s survival.

In this rights-based-era we live in, with globalization in vogue, it is not just commodities that are traded yet often tags that come with an unstoppable influx of infused culture-new, foreign and distant to us; and as we stand in awe at the conqueror, we despise our own within the boundaries and step across even if it is in the risk of giving up our culture, traditions and freedom. There is a wide difference between these cross-cultural ideas; like the idea of feeling self actualized and satisfied that according to Western philosophy is possible when facilitated through the accumulation of materialistic resources to maximize satisfaction that is directly contradictory to the Indian philosophy that speaks about the idea of giving up materialism to attain nirvana. The solution to many problems in the Indian context cannot lie in plausible formulae that seems to have worked in the West or elsewhere; owing to the fact that there is a serious discrepancy in the way hypothetical assumptions have been made of Indians and India on the basis of flawed conclusions drawn from misrepresentation and ideas drawn from an equally plausible imagination... (full paper will be shared upon publication)