Recently, many of us must have read about the wedding of the century, costing nearly US$80 million, of the daughter of one of the world’s richest men, a multibillionaire business tycoon in India. It was held over weeks, in different countries, with an opulence comparable only to some fabled wedding from the Arabian Nights. We must have gasped at the sheer scale of it all.
Some of us must also have been tempted to do some arithmetic: in a country where poverty continues to be appalling, the US$80 million would have been the total income of all the farmers, the street vendors, the garbage collectors, the rickshaw pedallers, etc for many years; it would have been sufficient to provide housing for hundreds of thousands of slum dwellers; it could have gone to prevent hundreds of thousands of children dying of hunger and disease.
I once saw a picture in a magazine of a group of elderly Indian widows, squatting on their thin haunches in a dusty courtyard of some building, their cotton saris draped over their heads, waiting to hear news of whether they would be granted an increase in some widows’ allowance, which would be exactly a dollar or thereabouts.
Equally indelible is the memory of something I saw with my own eyes when I was on a brief tour of Mumbai (then still Bombay) while on a cruise of the Queen Elizabeth 2. In a red light district, I saw a row of squalid houses in the doorways of which stood young prostitutes, some of them probably no more than fourteen or fifteen, calling shyly to the men around. I was told that many of them had been kidnapped from their homes in Nepal. I was also told that their asking price was US$2.
On the way to a hotel for lunch, as our taxi stopped at the traffic lights, a little beggar boy with one of his arms hacked off at the elbow, managed to wriggle his way through the dense traffic to knock on the rolled up window of my side of the taxi. I remember the small peaked face with its shock of hair. Contrary to prior advice about ignoring beggars, I quickly rolled down the window, and passed to him some notes from my handbag. Immediately a swarm of beggar children appeared from nowhere and surrounded the taxi. The taxi-driver got down, cuffed their heads and shooed them off, but not before giving me a reproachful look for causing all the inconvenience.
On a tour of the Philippines years ago, we were taken, as part of the tour of Manila, to the home of the one of the richest Filipinos. I remember magnificent chandeliers and drapes and antique European furniture, but the object that has stayed vividly in my memory is a statue of the Child Jesus wearing a mantle encrusted with real rubies. We could only look at it from a respectful distance, and were told it cost many million pesos—enough to feed all the beggars in the city for years.
The tour also included a visit to the famous cemeteries of the rich Chinese, where the tombs were in fact huge mansions. In one I saw an air-conditioned marble chamber containing the tomb, in rarest marble, of the patriarch of one of the city’s richest families. When I returned from the tour, I wrote a short story about how a slum family living near a tomb-mansion would wait every year for the rich food offered to the dead during the Chinese Festival of the Hungry Ghosts, to be thrown away by the caretaker after he had ascertained that the ghosts had indeed returned to partake of the feast. The proof was in the handprints or footprints left in a large tray of ash left near the banquet table. One year the ghosts were late in coming, and the food was already spoilt when it was at last thrown away, but the slum family fell eagerly upon it.
Years ago, I read an article on mother love, with examples from various countries in Asia. The example from Thailand was a report of an eighty-year-old woman supporting her mentally handicapped fifty-year-old daughter, on whatever she could earn from the only skill she had—picking coconuts. There was a picture of the old woman, her sarong hiked up between her legs, climbing a tall palm. She was paid a few dollars for her work. In my mind, her picture stands beside that of the jewel-bedecked wife of one of the Thai ministers. That single diamond ring on her little finger could take care of the old woman and her daughter for life.
It is an obscene arithmetic that continues to haunt many of us, for much of the world lives on less than US$1 a day. The obscenity lies less with the mega spenders than with the society that has allowed such a grotesque disparity to have gone on for so long.
28 February 2010
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