We are living in a world where finding contentment in living a
simple life is becoming increasingly difficult. Inequality is on the rise; some
are running an extravagant lifestyle while many are suffering from
underconsumption. Today I found the following text about what being poor feels
like on a friend's wall on Facebook. It is a really good read and tells us a
lot about the poor and multi-dimensionality of poverty. It also makes us think
about the expenditures we make, the ethics we subscribe to and the ends we work
towards.
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Late last year, two young men decided to live a month of their
lives on the income of an average poor Indian. One of them, Tushar, the son of
a police officer in Haryana, studied at the University of Pennsylvania and
worked for three years as an investment banker in the US and Singapore. The
other, Matt, migrated as a teenager to the States with his parents, and studied
at MIT. Both decided at different points to return to India, joined the UID
Project in Bengaluru, came to share a flat, and became close friends.
The idea suddenly struck them one day. Both had returned to India
in the vague hope that they could be of use to their country. But they knew the
people of this land so little. Tushar suggested one evening — “Let us try to
understand an ‘average Indian', by living on an ‘average income'.” His friend
Matt was immediately captured by the idea. They began a journey which would
change them forever.
To begin with, what was the average income of an Indian? They
calculated that India's Mean National Income was Rs. 4,500 a month, or Rs. 150
a day. Globally people spend about a third of their incomes on rent. Excluding
rent, they decided to spend Rs. 100 each a day. They realised that this did not
make them poor, only average. Seventy-five per cent Indians live on less than
this average.
The young men moved into the tiny apartment of their domestic help,
much to her bemusement. What changed for them was that they spent a large part
of their day planning and organising their food. Eating out was out of the
question; even dhabas were too expensive. Milk and yoghurt were expensive and
therefore used sparingly, meat was out of bounds, as were processed food like
bread. No ghee or butter, only a little refined oil. Both are passionate cooks
with healthy appetites. They found soy nuggets a wonder food — affordable and
high on proteins, and worked on many recipes. Parle G biscuits again were
cheap: 25 paise for 27 calories! They innovated a dessert of fried banana on
biscuits. It was their treat each day.
Restricted life
Living on Rs.100 made the circle of their life much smaller. They
found that they could not afford to travel by bus more than five km in a day.
If they needed to go further, they could only walk. They could afford
electricity only five or six hours a day, therefore sparingly used lights and
fans. They needed also to charge their mobiles and computers. One Lifebuoy soap
cut into two. They passed by shops, gazing at things they could not buy. They
could not afford the movies, and hoped they would not fall ill.
However, the bigger challenge remained. Could they live on Rs. 32,
the official poverty line, which had become controversial after India's
Planning Commission informed the Supreme Court that this was the poverty line
for cities (for villages it was even lower, at Rs. 26 per person per day)?
Harrowing experience
For this, they decided to go to Matt's ancestral village Karucachal
in Kerala, and live on Rs. 26. They ate parboiled rice, a tuber and banana and
drank black tea: a balanced diet was impossible on the Rs. 18 a day which their
briefly adopted ‘poverty' permitted. They found themselves thinking of food the
whole day. They walked long distances, and saved money even on soap to wash
their clothes. They could not afford communication, by mobile and internet. It
would have been a disaster if they fell ill. For the two 26-year-olds, the
experience of ‘official poverty' was harrowing.
Yet, when their experiment ended with Deepavali, they wrote to
their friends: “Wish we could tell you that we are happy to have our ‘normal'
lives back. Wish we could say that our sumptuous celebratory feast two nights
ago was as satisfying as we had been hoping for throughout our experiment. It
probably was one of the best meals we've ever had, packed with massive amounts of
love from our hosts. However, each bite was a sad reminder of the harsh reality
that there are 400 million people in our country for whom such a meal will
remain a dream for quite some time. That we can move on to our comfortable
life, but they remain in the battlefield of survival — a life of tough choices
and tall constraints. A life where freedom means little and hunger is plenty...
Plenty of questions
It disturbs us to spend money on most of the things that we now
consider excesses. Do we really need that hair product or that branded cologne?
Is dining out at expensive restaurants necessary for a happy weekend? At a
larger level, do we deserve all the riches we have around us? Is it just plain
luck that we were born into circumstances that allowed us to build a life of
comfort? What makes the other half any less deserving of many of these material
possessions, (which many of us consider essential) or, more importantly, tools
for self-development (education) or self-preservation (healthcare)?
We don't know the answers to these questions. But we do know the
feeling of guilt that is with us now. Guilt that is compounded by the love and
generosity we got from people who live on the other side, despite their tough
lives. We may have treated them as strangers all our lives, but they surely
didn't treat us as that way...”
So what did these two friends learn from their brief encounter with
poverty? That hunger can make you angry. That a food law that guarantees
adequate nutrition to all is essential. That poverty does not allow you to
realise even modest dreams. And above all — in Matt's words — that empathy is
essential for democracy.
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