Our poor and their poor are two different things. Everytime I fill out one of these online thingees that ask for annual income I compute my Indian income into dollars and check the correct amount – I don’t use purchasing power parity – simple exchange rate. And there I am close to the bottom of the income scale.

With Katrina – we have all been innundated with pictures of what are termed the poor . For afterall it was the poor that was left behind. And the definition of poor was not being able to afford $50 worth of fuel to drive off from point a to point b.
American Blogger John Scalzi has this really angsty piece on what it means to be poor. Which i guess is ok from a first world point of view. A few what it is like to be poor
Being poor is getting angry at your kids for asking for all the crap they see on TV.

Being poor is having to keep buying $800 cars because they’re what you can afford, and then having the cars break down on you, because there’s not an $800 car in America that’s worth a damn.

Being poor is hoping the toothache goes away.

Being poor is knowing your kid goes to friends’ houses but never has friends over to yours.

Peter Griffin rips into the post here on what it really means to be poor. Again a few choice quotes:

Being poor is not knowing how much everything costs. You can’t afford it anyway.

Being poor is thinking that a car is an unattainable luxury. Unless it’s an abandoned junkheap you can sleep in.

Being poor is hoping the tooth falls out.

Being poor is your kid goes to play on the street. When s/he’s not working, that is.

Being poor is not understanding the concepts “restroom,” “school,” and “lunch.”

Being poor is living next to – or over – a gutter. And getting evicted from there.

For me the worse kind of poverty that i saw was in the Pardhi village in Udgir. It redefined deprivation. There was nothing there. nothing. absolutely nothing. And there was no hope either. This is a Pardhi school where the roof is the sky and the floor is the ground, and all the teaching aids are in the well worn yellow bag that you can see in the picture

It seemed to be worse than the poverty that i am used to seeing in the city. And then i saw all those images of people dying of hunger in Africa.And that seemed to redefine the word poverty.

Poverty – what is to be really poor? Is it an absolute or like everything else relative to the society that you are in?