Ode to the hungry!

An article I wrote long before. I find it the most appropriate one to start my blog.

The first world country people know no poverty, hunger or hardships. For a majority of them, life is all about enjoying till their youth wanes out, and then working leisurely in order to provide the same to their children. Oblivious to the fact that there are more than three billion people struggling for the basic necessities and close to one billion people just managing to obtain them, the first world countries consume the resources as if there is no tomorrow! Their ignorance and misconception of poverty is very well exemplified by the essay a six year old toddler in school at one of those first world countries wrote on a poor family. It goes thus.

There is a poor family living by my house. They are very poor. There are four children in the house. They don’t even have a dog. They have only one car in the family and that too is quite old. Mr. Smith mows the lawn with some age old mower that doesn’t run on batteries.. Benny’s allowance is so much less than me. He can only afford to go to the mall two times a week. He broke his skateboard last month and Mrs. Smith didn’t buy him one till a couple of days before! Benny also has to share his room with Jimmy, his brother. They didn’t even paint their house last year! I feel really sad for them.

A photographer went to Africa for an assignment during the 20 year famine. He captured a photograph wherein, a small baby, hardly any flesh in him, was crawling to a UN camp a mile away and a vulture was waiting for that boy to die! One of them was going to have the privilege of a meal! The photographer left the place then and no one knows what happened of the child. He later won a Pulitzer Prize (the most coveted one in the field) for that photograph!! The photographer later committed suicide as he couldn’t bear the grief that the scene had brought to him! Just think, what of those who are suffering due to the lack of basic necessities??

The question is not about the opulent countries being drawn to the crisis in the Afro Asian countries, it is about the realization of the intensity of that crisis. Unless this realization happens, the people of the First World countries won’t be drawn to the eradication of the crisis. They are like the six year old child who does not know of the real time crisis faced by a huge mass living in the same planet as he is. Yes, the same planet, but an entirely different world. A world, I say to that child, where leave alone painting the house, even getting a shelter is a luxury…