As the earth is suffering with the burden of overpopulation, and the gap between haves-havenots widens, I am increasingly feeling like soon we will become two different races- The Haves & The Havenots...
I feel terrible, yesterday on news I watched about how some poor villagers in rural India wait for 2 days on the highway for a tanker of water... When the tanker arrives, they clamour for the water like animals, they fight, violence erupts... It is sad, all for water, the most basic necessity...
Apparently there is no ground water in those villages... Sad, somebody in the city makes a decision to dam a river, to alter the course of a river, to cut down forests in the Himalayas etc, and the side effect trickles down to the forgotten villages of Gujarat... I wondered, what do the people do there for a living? Surely they can't farm, so what can they do without a drop of water? I just cannot imagine the kind of life they must be living... If they migrate to the towns, they don't have the skillset to fit in, some of them probably take to drugs/prostitution/crime... It is like we are all human beings to look at, but one has an unfair advantage to begin with, while the other is stripped of their basic rights...
I guess Economics needs to be redefined.. There seems to be nothing like a "free good", land is not free, there are millions of people living in illegal slums all over the developing world, they are unregistered people, they don't count in any statistics, they have no rights to any subsidies, some of them manage to live on some charity, God knows about the others...
Water is not free, if you are in an Indian city, from the middle class, you can buy a tanker of water for Rs.500, if you can afford to pay, you are fine... But if you are from a forgotten village, you have to wait for 3 days for a tanker that might not come at all... And if you do not manage to collect any water in the ensuing clamour-for-water (I saw men climbing all over the moving tanker like monkeys, like dogs fighting for a piece of meat, so thirsty they must have been), there is no justice, no fair distribution...
Here in my home, I have unlimited water... If the community water tank's level drops below a point, it is the management's responsibility to refill with a tanker, I am oblivious, I just pay the monthly rent & maintenance fee..
I don't really know how to help those poor thirsty people I saw on TV, they are reduced to the state of an animal existence, I feel guilty inside my heart... I feel like part of the water that I am using, perhaps belongs to them... But I can't share it with them, I can't transport it to them, I cannot alter the dam projects or reverse the deforestation... I can only continue living my life, feeling guilty inside my heart... What I can do is, pray... and my prayer won't solve their problem...
Yet in another part of the world, massive floods, loss of life...
So somebody dies because he has too little water to drink,,, and somebody else dies because too much of water drank him up...
I do try not to waste water though... A relative of mine drains away all the old stock of water that she collects in her drum every two days when she gets fresh water... I don't do such things, I never pour water off into the drains, I make a point to use every drop, at least I can do that when I know that I am perhaps using somebody else's share of water which they don't get access to and which I have access to, it is all part of karma?...
I feel terrible, yesterday on news I watched about how some poor villagers in rural India wait for 2 days on the highway for a tanker of water... When the tanker arrives, they clamour for the water like animals, they fight, violence erupts... It is sad, all for water, the most basic necessity...
Apparently there is no ground water in those villages... Sad, somebody in the city makes a decision to dam a river, to alter the course of a river, to cut down forests in the Himalayas etc, and the side effect trickles down to the forgotten villages of Gujarat... I wondered, what do the people do there for a living? Surely they can't farm, so what can they do without a drop of water? I just cannot imagine the kind of life they must be living... If they migrate to the towns, they don't have the skillset to fit in, some of them probably take to drugs/prostitution/crime... It is like we are all human beings to look at, but one has an unfair advantage to begin with, while the other is stripped of their basic rights...
I guess Economics needs to be redefined.. There seems to be nothing like a "free good", land is not free, there are millions of people living in illegal slums all over the developing world, they are unregistered people, they don't count in any statistics, they have no rights to any subsidies, some of them manage to live on some charity, God knows about the others...
Water is not free, if you are in an Indian city, from the middle class, you can buy a tanker of water for Rs.500, if you can afford to pay, you are fine... But if you are from a forgotten village, you have to wait for 3 days for a tanker that might not come at all... And if you do not manage to collect any water in the ensuing clamour-for-water (I saw men climbing all over the moving tanker like monkeys, like dogs fighting for a piece of meat, so thirsty they must have been), there is no justice, no fair distribution...
Here in my home, I have unlimited water... If the community water tank's level drops below a point, it is the management's responsibility to refill with a tanker, I am oblivious, I just pay the monthly rent & maintenance fee..
I don't really know how to help those poor thirsty people I saw on TV, they are reduced to the state of an animal existence, I feel guilty inside my heart... I feel like part of the water that I am using, perhaps belongs to them... But I can't share it with them, I can't transport it to them, I cannot alter the dam projects or reverse the deforestation... I can only continue living my life, feeling guilty inside my heart... What I can do is, pray... and my prayer won't solve their problem...
Yet in another part of the world, massive floods, loss of life...
So somebody dies because he has too little water to drink,,, and somebody else dies because too much of water drank him up...
I do try not to waste water though... A relative of mine drains away all the old stock of water that she collects in her drum every two days when she gets fresh water... I don't do such things, I never pour water off into the drains, I make a point to use every drop, at least I can do that when I know that I am perhaps using somebody else's share of water which they don't get access to and which I have access to, it is all part of karma?...
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