The Indian Middle-class

A newly proposed definition of what constitutes a middle class in a developing country, seeks to only consider those that earn at least 10$ a day, after excluding the top 5% of the richest people in the country. Shockingly this would mean that India would have no middle-class. One could argue with how the figure of 10$ was arrived at, but I can't help being shocked by the level of disparity in incomes between the reasonably well-off and the vast multitudes of the poor. It's going to take more than a few cosmetic 'on-paper' laws to turn things around.

Religious encounters of the strange kind

I don't think about religion on a daily basis. If anything, I would describe my self as agnostic leaning towards atheistic. But more than anything else, I think religion is an extremely personal matter, and I'm all for the cultural aspects of religious celebrations (for the most part anyway). As far as religion is concerned, I'd describe myself as "don't care", which made a recent encounter that I had all the more odd.

I was walking home, when I saw a couple on the sidewalk. I had a fair inkling of what they were doing when I noticed that the person walking in front of me had to weave his way through the couple, vigorously shaking his head as he walked by. The man (one half of the couple) would almost block your path thereby forcing you to listen to him. He had a book in his hand and a extremely-wide-and-therefore-creepy smile plastered on his face. Predictably he stood right in front of me. I noticed that both the man and the woman looked fairly young, probably in their mid-thirties and spoke with thick Asian accents. The conversation went something like this,

Man : Hello! Are you christian?
Me : No
Man : Are you Jewish?
Me : No
Man : What religion are you?
(I was tempted at this point to just walk away, but I didn't I'm not really sure why)
Me : Hindu
(I was a little surprised by my own answer. I think that the bottom-line is that I didn't really want to discuss my beliefs with a random stranger on the street. What happened next is the bit that I found really odd.)

Man : "Oh ... Have a nice day!"

This exchange left me a little baffled. I wonder what he was trying to do.

Hypothesis 1: He was actively trying to convert people away from Christianity/Judaism
Hypothesis 2: He was actively trying to convert people to Hinduism
Hypothesis 3: Either way, he didn't want to spend anymore time on the conversation

I'm not quite sure what to make of it all.

Winter

A single icicle juts out in front of my window, dripping slowly in the bright sunshine. Spring is just around the corner. I carefully make my way down the sidewalks covered in snow, soon to be packed into an uncrossable sheet of ice. I can't help thinking that winter this year has been worse than the last. My gloved hands return to my coat pockets, still stinging gently under the light wool. The trees are still bare; the colors of fall a many months away. For now, I wait patiently for warmer weather, for spring and then summer. Until then I pray that we've received the last heavy snowfall for the season.

Of Gut-Wrenching Poverty

Life in India is full of contradictions, as any visitor to the country will tell you. For someone living in India, however, reconciling these contradictions is essential for survival. It is hard if not impossible, to be faced with crippling poverty on a daily basis and not feel an overwhelming sense of sadness and guilt.
My home state of Maharashtra was recently contemplating changing the rules so that taxi permits would only be issued to persons who had lived in the state for at least fifteen years and can "read and write marathi (the local language)". The move is primarily aimed at keeping migrant workers from poorer states from acquiring local jobs. In a country where a vast number of people are illiterate, where we have failed to provide our poorest and most vulnerable sections of society with a minimum standard of living, where large sections of the population go hungry, this is what the Government imagines up. Perhaps we should soon expect a set of minimum qualifications that all of the urban poor must meet if they want to subsist amongst the more affluent. The irony is not lost on me.