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Thursday 18 September 2014

Change from I to We

"Health is wealth", this saying has been fed into my head since I first stepped into my school. These three words together create one of the most truthful life teachings of all times. At school I knew it but didn't think much about it, actually I really never thought about it much, but as I opened myself to the realms of this mammoth world it was then when I realised that "okay, this is the most crucial sentence for anyone's life."
This sentence is a simple yet hard truth that's integral for not just me and you but also the other living creatures of this planet.

In our childhoods we hardly paid any heed to even think about it but on the insides we definitely knew what it meant literally but not what it meant "actually"! And that's where I feel we were being oblivious to something that was there always in front of us but rarely did anyone do anything for it.

Why is it so much important for the survival? Why is it that this sentence holds so much weight in the lives of every single human being? These questions are way back in the queue to be answered. They hold importance but aren't our priorities at the moment. Why so? Because in "health is wealth", health has been lost somwhere deep into the crevices of this society. And in the quest for wealth, things have gone from bad to worse. It's been a silent change in the way people have started to take this life changing phrase. Everybody knows that health is crucial for wealth but despite of this "knowledge" there is a race for wealth first.

And what leaves me horrified is the fact that due to this imbalance, health levels have gone down and with wealth there's something that has increased and that is, hunger. Ironical isn't it? People might say that, " How the hell is it possible? How come hunger can be in direct proportion to wealth?" Well, I have the answer.

In this wealth race, our mindsets have changed to "I" rather than "we" and this has been the missing link to the downfall of "health is wealth". There are some nicer souls who still have had the ability to strike the balance but the majority has failed to follow the "we" culture than the "I" one. This imbalance has made some richer or even richest but it also has made some poor or poorest! The richer ones have collected the wealth but also have they become unaware of the most dangerous problem of our society. Hunger.

Hunger accompanied with malnutrition has dented not only our nation but the entire planet. It's silently yet terrifically spreading its vicious wings over all the countries. People face shortage of even the basic food and then they starve and starve and starve more but one day, they ultimately die. They die in the quest of hunger and they die in the state of malnutrition. About 842 million people in the world do not eat enough to be healthy.  That means that one in every eight  people on Earth goes to bed hungry each night. A third of all deaths in children under the age of five in developing countries are linked to undernutrition(India is also a developing country). Most of the world’s undernourished people are still to be found in Southern Asia, closely followed by sub-Saharan Africa and Eastern Asia.

These facts leaves me shocked! Those stats are literally horrifying. And then I realize that so many people undergo such huge deprivation of food! It makes me feel for those food starved people and especially those malnourished infants who came into this world with their baby cries and then with days passing those cries turn into the cries of agony, pain and HUNGER.

But why such a massive problem? Here's why...

If women farmers had the same access to resources as men, the number of hungry in the world could be reduced by up to 150 million. The gender inequality has always been a bane to any sorts of development in any country( especially Middle East and South East Asia). Women have had to face the beating and here also they arent spared. The orthodoxies of our society have caused this severe imbalance of fodd and has led to such a massive shortage of food to people.
It costs just US $0.25 per day to provide a child with all of the vitamins and nutrients he or she needs to grow up healthy. The "wealth race" has not allowed this to happen. Corruption and the intense greed for money has resulted in this unequal share of money and that has ultimately lead to shortages of basic food to people. Humans have gone crazy to create heaps of money for themselves but in this cruel quest they have forgotten to  help out these painstruck people.

By 2050, climate change and erratic weather patterns could have pushed another 24 million children into hunger. Almost half of these children would be in sub-Saharan Africa. Unequal distribution of resources in  African counties has already made them the hunger countries of the world and it's not far when all of us would be living in what would then be called as the "Hunger World". It's time to step in and to help these innocent souls. It's time to stop the money race, it's time to inhibit all wars and come together to share our resources with them and uproot this venom known as Hunger.