I am going to expose your few remaining neurons to a new social, commerce and trade, and political form that potentially transposes general notions by propelling the ninety-nine percent to the top and take care of the one percent less fortunate at the bottom. And Caesar, ahem, you the reader, would have to decide my fate!
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I see poor people
"In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of."â Confucius
In my view, by far the creepiest social site out there is the one dedicated to M. Night Shyamalan by one of his diehard followers. For an Indian-American to achieve such a high level of success as a screenwriter, film producer, director, and A-listed star of Hollywood without relying on the clichéd dancing and chanting in Bollywood cinematographic format is impressive. I am, myself, a huge fan of his breakthrough and most celebrated movie The Sixth Sense (1999). This movie's box office gross suggests that there are not many homo-sapiens who have not watched it. For the rest of you who were still living in cages around that time, the superb plot is around a boy, Cole, who has the ability to communicate with spirits that don't know they are dead. He seeks the help of a depressed child psychologist, a role superbly played by one of Hollywood's biggest stars at the time, Bruce Willis. The movie's good bumping moment comes when the camera slowly zooms to the boy's face, then-unknown child actor, Haley Joel Osment, and he whispers, "I see dead people," turning the line instantly into one of the most used catchphrases of that time.
It has been quite some time since I found myself entangled in a dilemma similar to Cole's. No doubt that the crusade I have embarked on has drawn me to experience life as I never thought I would. Let me assure you, the life of a hermit monk has not sounded appealing to me, yet. I have to say that the emotional expedition has broken my myopic life lenses, which forced me to observe my surroundings, relying on all of my senses, and upped my state of consciousness. After enlisting new priorities in my daily life, nowadays, I have a hard time sleeping all through the night. My mind fly miles away in the middle of dull seminars and conversations. When you have voices nagging in your head, pointing left and right, life becomes a wild roller coaster ride. I came to wonder when the devil had possessed me? I cannot afford to hire my own disheartened shrink, even less so Bruce Willis (I tried). In the goal of exorcising my demons, I hope that pinning down critical events in my ordinary life will help me trace the original trigger that led to my obsession with caring for the less fortunate. I cannot stop seeing poor people!
Tara's parents, Haitian immigrants, ran away from the hard knock life of New York City to raise their newly born child in The United States retirement epicenter in South Florida. From the time Tara and I met, she was boiling to reverse her parents' migration cycle and talked my ears off about the "Big Apple." When you add my wife's inducement strategy to the list of egotistic New Yorkers I had met in Florida, you start imagining the city as if it was the land of milk and honey; a nirvana where opportunities and excitement are waiting on every corner. It came as a huge disappointment to my wife that we did not move to her dream city, but rather into a quaint little town in Massachusetts. Ironically, I commuted routinely to New York City for school. The graduate program I matriculated into was situated smack dab in Manhattan, right in the mix of historic skyscrapers and not far from the around-the-clock and year-long tourist-infected Times Square. Learning from my experience, I have to caution folks out there dying to get a large bite of the "Big Apple," before moving up north, to scrutinize the madness diligently older and rich folks are running away from.
New York City is home to the world's boldest financial delinquents: the New York Stock Exchange, NASDAQ, and the most mismanaged international organization headquarters, the United Nations. New York has an estimated Gross Domestic Product higher than Saudi Arabia, and almost twice that of Switzerland. It has had a billionaire as a mayor, Michael Bloomberg, and larger than life unofficial multi-millionaire mayor of the blacks in the city, Sean John Combs aka Puff Daddy. Everything is glamorously portrayed in vivid 4k, except such things as the cityâs rodent problem and crime ridden bloodbaths in Brownsville, Brooklyn. The poor exist everywhere and the rich are hardly there, and hardly better off. They exist among the towers in self-delusion that living higher up the concrete structure in a gilded cage with fingerprint ID for entry makes them better off somehow. Why is the city not able to take care of the poor?
As I pushed amongst the crowds, the seemingly too busy to stay still, what I kept bumping into on every corner were the beleaguered faces of the poor. It is a constant draconian knot to my mind how a city awash in capital is not able to find a humane solution to the disparities of its inhabitants. Some walk in ragged shoes while other leap off the top of the skyscrapers in helicopters only to land at private airports and fly away in private jets to private islands to do private things if known would bring scorn and reproach upon their heads. Is this not poverty? Poverty of the mind, the soul, the flesh-eating disease from within that consumes them along with the physical diseases they keep contracting that only their wealth allows them to fight with antibiotics. If the trickle-down theory can ever be successful it must surely begin as dew, or rain, and start at the top would find minds less consumed with tower living, helicopters and private jets.
I find it torturous walking out of the New York City central station, dodging the overlooked mentally ill, and avoiding eye contact with those who are laying on the floor. This morose spectacle has turned me into a good priest passing the Eucharist or in my case, my lunch money. When winter came, I realized that there were fewer and fewer beggars around my usual crucifixion path. At last, I could get a decent meal without the burning guilty sentiment lodged in my gut. I was unable to silence my suspicions for long and questioned where the lava of homeless had gone that I had become accustomed to. In reality, no miracle had happened - just the weather. As ol'man winter makes its grim appearance, the homeless try to find warm shelters and, inevitably, have to retreat into invisibility.
In 2013, alarming news emerged of the spike in the number of homeless arriving at shelters, and due to housing's limited capacities, adults and children alike had to be turned away every night. What to say about the number of the United States veterans who are homeless? If the United States, currently ranked as the wealthiest nation on Earth, doesn't move Heaven and Earth to care for those who have answered the call to honorably serve the country and abandon noble beings who have put their life at risk to protect the nation, I can't think about anyone else it can show empathy to.
Not to pick on the United States alone the World Bank estimates that more than half of Mumbai residents live in slums that are otherwise by any standard unsafe and uninhabitable, and yet 11 million souls exist day to day1. The "Slumdog Millionaire" is how most people of the western world got a sense of life in Mumbai, and several scenes from the movie were recorded there. Mumbai is a city of contrasts, which is home to some of the country's wealthiest businessmen and Bollywood film stars. I cannot help but wonder if the archaic caste system and deep-rooted religious faith have made the common Indian susceptible to accept disparity in their society as a work of divine force: destiny.
I could not find any public outcry against the Indian space program's (I.S.R.O) budget that gradually boosted up to 1.3 billion dollars in 2013. The I.S.R.O. budget figures triggered countries such as India's former colonial power, the United Kingdom, and one of the nation's best buddies, the United States, to cut aid fund to India. The amount is evidently small compared to the I.S.R.O budget, but it was a huge hit taken by diverse programs that provide needed services to an estimated 421 million of poor Indians. This number is higher than in the twenty-six poorest African nations. What was India's response to the aid cut? "We do not really need the aid," said Palaniappan Chidambaram, India's finance minister at the time.
In November 2013, my Indian-American friends celebrated when India's space program confirmed that the Mars Orbiter had debuted
