Most days I pass slums and I don't feel much.
Maybe that means I'm a terrible person, maybe I still haven't fully realized that those slums, streaming by my car window like a roll of a film, are in no documentary, that people like you and I are living in shacks of tarp and iron sheeting. I hoped it wasn't just me, and I asked my host sister about her emotional responses to seeing Indian poverty. "Nothing", she said, and shrugged.
Perhaps many people, not just us, feel guilty of this lack of feeling and fill that cavity with donations to charities or mission trips. Although I'd like to change those living conditions and I'm planning to in my life and career, it's impossible and antipragmatic to have an emotional response to the plight of billions of humans, especially when I grow accustomed to it--shabby tents blending in with the landscape. ("One death is a tragedy", Stalin wrote. "One million deaths is a statistic"). It's still hard to admit that I'm not feeling the feelings I feel I should.
Now that I've come across as an ignorant white male upper-middle class American teenager, which I am, let me clarify. Although the poverty might not always grab me (except when it does: a small child, clutching my wrist, asking for money, bursting my bubble of removal,) what angers me is instead the disparities in opportunity. That means poverty, of course, but especially education.
Working alongside tenth grade students at a government school has been one phenomenal privilege and heart-wrenching ordeal. Each Friday for the past five weeks, we've worked in small groups on meaningless projects about American and Indian celebrities. Yet when we left for the last time, there were tears.
I suspect that the crying didn't come from the knowledge that we would never again see our partners again, though that was certainly a part. The incredible, simple fact that my partner and I are Facebook friends delays that knowledge for me. Nor did the tears (for the record, not mine) trickle from the discovery that the fun was over--I would be having plenty more dance parties and laughing fits back in America. Instead, my sadness, at least, came from bitterness. The realization that I had done absolutely nothing to deserve a comfortable life in America, a school and teachers that are first-class and taken for granted all the time, the ability to choose my own career without restraints. And the cruel fact that these kids from lower class families had likewise done nothing to be crammed into classes of 40 in a Marathi-medium school (an immediate disadvantage in the competitive workforce in which those wealthy enough have attended English language education) and to have to struggle out of their parents' economic class.
We were with our partners for just an hour and a half each week. Yet the connection we made rivaled the bonds with our host families. I'll remember them for a long time: Hemlata, the girl who didn't speak too much English but had a happier smile than anyone, whose family had moved all the way from Rajasthan in search of better education. Prakash, with an impeccable moonwalk, who wants to become an engineer but told me he will never stop dancing. I want these kids to succeed, and I know they can.
The truth is, however, I'm never going to see them again. The twenty-first century has made incredible progress in facilitating worldwide connections--Prakash and I can now communicate with just two computers and a sprinkle of wifi--but I still might never know what happens to them. And if they step out of the lower class and pursue their own passions, there will still be millions of others who can't.
Even those with parental guidance, the resources to continue education, and the smarts to succeed do not have the same liberties I've been given. Unless every single kid I've met here (I can think of 7) has engineering in his or her veins, just one slice of the career option pie is being set before them. With societal pressures and economic incentives behind that push, I imagine it would be difficult to refuse. Perhaps I simply don't know (engineering is the only safe choice in this still developing, often less-than-structured nation,) but I vastly prefer the selection of jobs displayed to me like pieces of pie in a shop window that all cost the same.
I've never felt that I have a duty to make everyone equal. But I do strongly feel that everyone has the duty to ensure everyone has the same opportunities, for that's the only way democracy, capitalism, and the world work. They just don't yet.
