A slumdog nation?
The world’s largest population of urban poor, the world largest population of hungry and undernourished kids and the world’s largest population without schools.
Is it pride that justifies keep these statistics, and worst still the real people who make these numbers, in oblivion, because the growth story on your shinning white collar gets stained.
The worst crime in a democracy is to keep those denied the fruits of it on the margins to make our itchy conscience clean. The bubbles of growth have to be protected from the stench of slums. As smell is hard to forget and wipe out. It lingers and seeps into dreams supported by cushy beds far removed from the slums with airtight air-conditioned rooms.
For those on the streets, the generation next of urban poverty, it is not celluloid that sustains dreams but something much real, the spirit of having lived yet another day without the state or its growth.
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