The most moving scene in the context of the DEVA Institute was probably the leper village in Varanasi, where perfectly healthy children accompany their sick mothers and where every family has their own one-room house and so can live an almost normal life, cook their own food and clean their own home. They get weekly medical care and medicines which can arrest the progress of the disease. The French director of DEVA who introduced us to the more or less handicapped people hugged the patients as if they were his children and family. It was wonderful to see since they are used to considering themselves unclean and untouchable.
India – its charm and its deep problems
India, the country full of charm, India the country of beauty, India the country of friendliness, but India the country where the severe poverty is visible everywhere, where the inequality in people's lives is the most extreme we have ever witnessed, where hunger and disease are considered as the normal conditions of life, where the government is not concerned enough with protecting the suffering millions, only with making deals with the giant multinational corporations so as to increase the wealth of the wealthy.
But at the same time as the country is politically on such a devastating track of ignoring the weak and the poor, there is the beneficial absence of hype and artificiality that seem to make up the very substance of the western world. There is a sense of uncomplicated reality in the lives of the people we see in the cities and in the countryside. A simplicity that wins out over all the hardship that is so clearly the lot of the hard-working people. People take life as it comes without hyped-up dreams of luxury and change. They take care of their daily chores without complaining and without looking aside to see if their neighbors are getting a bigger house than theirs.
I have to make it clear though that I am not talking here about the yuppies and business people in the big cities who make loads of money and live the good life, the same as in every other industrialized country in the world.
A solution is possible
The problems of India are of course also worldwide. Here, as well as in the rest of the world, it would be perfectly possible and not very difficult at that, to feed the millions of hungry and suffering people. All it would take is a world-wide policy of feeding the hungry and providing decent health care, instead of digging in ever deeper in the politics of the free market which does nothing but render the desperate situation in the world ever more desperate. [9]
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