Leila's blog

Sat, May 10, 2008

Do you take more than you give?

They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Being non religious this doesn't bother me, but as someone who wishes to juggle too many balls letting this blog drop off my radar occasionally does give me a twinge of guilt. I have been meaning to blog about India for a while because my reading stuff and on-line TV seems to have ended up being based around this country. I'll blame my book club in part - we have had both 'Midnights Children' and 'City of Joy' to read this year. City of Joy was the most recent; a beautiful story of generosity and unconditional love in the midst of unimaginable poverty and squalor in Calcutta's slums. Then there is Blood, Sweat and T-Shirts, a series being shown by the BBC, where fashion loving British youngsters are given a taster of the lives behind their clothes. If you haven't seen it yet, I'd recommend you catch the latest one on BBC iPlayer.
The need for loving and giving instead of taking from each other and the Earth is also the theme of my current bedside book, Satish Kumar's 'You Are, Therefore I Am'. The lesson of managing desire is one I, like so much of the world, could take on board sometimes. Satish uses conversations with inspirational people to advocate simplicity for both peace of mind and the future of the planet. This type of approach is sometimes ridiculed as a 'return to the middle ages', I suspect by those who believe that progress = consumption, whereas appropriate technology and localised economies can give a real quality of life to everyone. So, while absorbing these messages of hope the continuing tragic news from Burma puts my faith in humanity to the test. I have been following the story closely but fail to see a way out of the deadlock. Sadly it is the usual drivers of greed and power preventing basic provisions from those in dire need. Meanwhile in Britain, Brown's tax rise disguised as a tax cut is chewed over and various means of compensating the poor are discussed, although no one has suggested the obvious way of raising revenue - forget a stealth tax by removing the 10p rate just increase the top rate of tax. Yet, he won't do this and it won't be suggested because the rich have everyone running scared that they will take all their wealth overseas. When your rich, after all, what you really need is to keep hold of as much of (y)our money as possible.

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