After many crankings of this feeble and befuddled mind, I have come to the conclusion that it must all be the working of the “Hidden Hand” of the great Almighty. It’s hidden and so you can’t explain how it works.
I mean, how else does one make any sense of this absolutely confusing state of things.
Just consider: There is so much hue and cry about poverty. Apparently, 3.25 billion people, that means, every second guy on this planet, earns less than $2 a day.
Translated into Indian English, it means they don’t have enough roti (food), kapda (clothing), and makan (housing).
Highly mysterious state of affairs! For, if you check the evidence you would find that as of today, we humans are producing enough to feed, clothe and house every one. What is this poverty non-sense all about?
For example:
Roti (Food):
You can eat up to nearly 1 kg of food grains a day. Breakfast cereals, rice, wheat-based breads of all kinds, and yes, even cakes if you wish, in case you want to honour the great Queen Antoinette’s kind advise, since we also have enough milk, 282 cc to be exact, at least one egg a day and 66 gms of sugar, so it’s your choice really – a cake or a sunny-side-up fried egg with toast for breakfast. And, of course, enough tea or coffee.
For lunch and dinner, you can have up to 55 gms of fish – a pretty large piece for a fish curry during lunch even for a “fishophile” Bengali, 36 gms of chicken – perhaps, a nicely roasted leg piece during dinner, and 74 gms of red meat any time during the day – maybe a real Big Mac Burger cocking a snook at Big Mac Montek.
And yes, just to balance your diet and ensure that your intake of anti-oxidants, fibre, vitamins and essential minerals are nicely included, you can have at least 156 gms of fruits, enough for a day and also for fruit juice if you so desired at breakfast or at any other time of the day, and as much as 392 gms of vegetables, a bit too much but then some of it will go waste as is their wont ( I believe we in India lose 40 percent of our production or Rs 50,000 crore a year in value terms due tothe lack of cold chain facilities. What a waste!).
In short, all of us can have 5, I repeat five, 5-star meals every day given what we produce these days.
But if you look at the facts of this mysterious case of hunger in the midst of plenty, more than half of us don’t even get two round meals a day, leave alone even one 5-star treat ever in life. Very confusing!
Even more confusing when you find that:
Nearly one out of four people are overweight while nearly one out of seven are officially undernourished, that means they more or less survive on thin air or at least don’t eat what is normally called humanly edible food.
What is even more shocking, and, of course, even more confusing, is that as many as 29,620 people have died today, even as I write, out of starvation, and if that is a daily average, it means on any given day, if you go out of your house in any metro in India, you would be staring at at least three potential starvation deaths as you would surely see more than 200 people even if you are out only for a brief sojourn.
Finally, water. Despite the Earth being two thirds water and one third land, the only known planet with water in liquid form, etc., etc., 1 out of 7 humans don’t have a safe source of drinking water. Can you live without drinking water? Maybe you can do so for sometime without food - after all, if the Annas of the world can do it, so can we, but without drinking water? How do people live without drinking water? What do they drink then? If they are existing they must be drinking. I am confused, totally confused.
Kapda (Clothing):
The documentary evidence in this dimension of the case is again equally confusing. Apparently, you have $257 or Rs 12,778 to spend every year on apparels with the global apparel market being $1800 billion, enough to clothe you well for a year, even including winter wear. We produce enough garments, enough fabric and enough of the raw materials needed to keep all of us well-clothed throughout the year.
Makan (Housing):
The situation here is perhaps, even more baffling. Right now every fifty households in the world can have not only one house each but one extra house for vacations, country retreat, what have you? The choice is yours really because we have enough.
But even here we find that nearly one out of 70 people you see around you are officially, by definition, homeless. That means they are truly homeless. They sleep in the open or on the streets in case they can find a safe spot.
Add to that the fact that one out of every seven guys you meet on the street lives in a slum.
If you also consider all the other guys who live in inadequate housing to use a mild-term, then the whole thing becomes even more mind boggling – every second guy you meet does not have a proper house or even a proper rented accommodation to live in.
And then if you consider only those having a house of their own, then you are completely stumped – nearly 8 out of 10 guys are kind of permanently displaced persons having no permanent address.
Now, I am completely befuddled. We, the people, produce more than enough roti, kapada and makan by working in the fields, factories and construction sites. Yet, we don’t have enough food to eat, enough clothes to wear or a roof to sleep under. I am quite flummoxed. If not us, who consumes all that we produce?
Then I thought, maybe with my weak brain I had got all the numbers wrong. Let’s go by the copy-paste method where you can’t make a mistake, even if the other guy has made one or several. So, I went to look at the world GDP and per capita income figures.
I was in for another shock. Average global per capita income by purchasing power parity is $10,500 when, in reality, more than 50% earn less than $730 a year. Can you imagine? If, after doing all the work and producing a $75 trillion world economy, we earn a total of only about $2.5 trillion a year, so little, who earns all the rest of the roughly $72.5 trillion of total global income? This is getting crazier and crazier.
Finally, I gave up and decided okay let’s not cry over spilt milk, let’s take solace from the fact that at least half of us are living well. But again several shocks. It turns out that there are just about 1,011 billionaires out of 7 billion people. That means, one out of 7 million people – an extremely rare species. Fine, what about millionaires, there should be many more? Yes, there are, but still far too few. Only 10 million or 3 out of every 2,000 guys you meet – certainly much rarer than the three starvation deaths that you are likely to see every time you step out of your house.
If you now round up all those who are living more or less an acceptable life, although there is no such thing anymore what with climate change and all that, you will still find that only three out of every 10 people can be said to be doing that – living an acceptable life.
The rest of us are living a dog’s life.
Naturally, this situation can be dog-made but certainly not man-made. I mean, why should the vast majority of us, nearly 70%, or more than two-thirds, voluntarily want a system where you do all the hard work and somebody else takes the cake and walks away? It’s crazy, it can’t be, I concluded. I mean, I am a fool, that’s fine, little debate about that, but how can nearly 5 billion people be so foolish?
Obviously, it’s the handiwork of somebody else. I patted myself on the back. What fine detection work to come to the conclusion that this is a sure case of murder, it cannot be a suicide.
The next step obviously is to search for a murder suspect and that means looking for a motive. So, I asked myself who benefits from all this?
“Obviously, the Rich,” my smart-ass Watson piped up.
“No way boy, you got it all wrong,” I said, still full of myself after making the stunning discovery that this is a murder and not a suicide case.
Moreover, I went on importantly, “I have interrogated the Rich and they have consistently given one and only one answer – we did not create this system, God and his Hidden Hand did – and all this time Watson we have been looking for the dog who created this dog’s life. How silly of us, when it was God all the time. But anyway, Watson, I checked if the facts tallied and you know what? These Rich, who are so mean and stingy when it comes to paying wages and salaries to people who produce all their wealth, donate over-generously to God and you know why?”, I asked smart-ass Watson in my own smart-ass way.
They say “Thank God – or where would we be?” and pay huge sums of money to God, to keep the creator of the system and his “Hidden Hand” always well-oiled so that they can go on getting richer from all the wealth generated by the poor.
“Haven’t you heard of the massive amounts of wealth that are being regularly discovered in sundry temples and churches all over the world? Or that, during this Great Recession, there was no dent in temple donations, in fact, they grew, as our venerable ET has reported?,” I asked, and rested my case having provided conclusive evidence about how the Rich keeps the Almighty satisfied for the mighty system he has created in his infinite wisdom for giving free play to his golden “Hidden Hands” for the immense benefit of the few Rich and acute distress of the many Poor!
See Watson, no confusion now. Case solved. Everything is falling in place. With the Almighty’s Hidden Hands being the real culprit and playing all the dirty tricks, even the poor have no choice but to perennially look up to him and pray:
Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors the Rich, who regularly bum our work and heads.
