"Poverty is never an excuse for achieving one's dreams".
While I agree with the message wholeheartedly, I think it's also indicative of the sick mentality to celebrate poverty.
We all must praise and empathize with individuals who come up in their life and go on to scale great heights in different realms despite poverty and societal pressure driven hardships.
We as a nation, especially, the rich, upper middle class, governments of all parties, corporate CSR holders, NRIs all must feel ashamed at poverty levels ( in a country aspiring to become a super power) along with hyper conservative attitudes, a hoard of other irresponsible behaviors, our grand indifference all put together.
Not that disparities do not exist in other nations. Not that poverty is not used as very useful pawn by every religion, political system in addition to other pawns of race, caste, gender biases.
When disparities and discriminations are paraded either as virtues or objects of sympathy one must realize that behind the prolonged parading of such status lurks a sense of deprivations and insecurities which will turn into potential dynamites for revolts.
Mere superficial lip sympathies, periodic patronizing doting of freebies and praise when people from such backgrounds achieve some success alone will not do.
Collectively from 1950 the total number of MLAs and MP every time when they got elected if they have laid just 5 small roads properly , provided electricity to one small part of a village we could have had 20,00,000 well laid roads and 4 lakh small villages with electricity. The basic necessities for life. This applies not only to politicians but all others in the list mentioned earlier. If only we had a real humanitarian attitude from all those, ours is perhaps the only country which could easily become a poverty free nation.
Social welfare comes about not through political ideology peddling, religious preaching, or a multitude of economic systems but through a sense of social responsibility beyond and besides those social engineering tools.
History has been witness to poverty swing between two populist extreme ideologies:- one socio-economic political dispensation capitalizing on sensationalized victimhood peddling while other socio-economic political dispensation using its capital to trade off pecuniary benefits for inhuman treatment, hard labor and stripping the poor of self respect.
The least we can do is to abuse and to find fault with the community that has delayed the blossoming of such talents and subjected such talents to unnecessary hardships.
Let us not resort to over philosophize or to generalize or resort to comparisons of places worse than ours bla bla.
Celebration of Poverty is never a good thing. Celebration of deracination from humane concerns is unethical.
Any proposal that is put forth to change the status of the wretched problem of misery which has existed much before the famous ' Oliver Twist' and continues to haunt societies will sound obviously idealistic.
However, on progress I am a rational optimist and believe in possibilitarianism. Changes do happen either incrementally, gradually, spontaneously through the interactions and involvement of many at various levels through some developments observed across several societies where there has been a growing population of the middle class-the vital bridge between the poor and the rich. This bridge will strengthen by paying attention to the nuances of real values at multiple levels, be it healthy political democracy, protection of humanitarian concerns, value of the native culture , promoting arts, sports, scientific outlook etc.
The rich may not bother about most things unless their business and personal life are affected and the poor because of their dependence may not care for nuances and niceties as long as someone comes forward to help them come out of poverty.
The responsibility and relevance of the bridge between the two becomes vital in various aspects of a nation's economy, culture, collective socio-psychological behaviors etc.
As Lester Thurow says, "A healthy middle class is necessary to have a healthy political democracy. A society made up of rich and poor has no mediating group either politically or economically.”
Again the same author writes, "Change requires individuals who recognise that new things can be done and who take the initiative to get them done ... The existing bureaucracies, public and private, will not take on the job of changing what is".
As existential priorities change, most identities of religion, region, race etc, may continue as they wish but will hopefully take a back seat as they should.
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