It’s Blog Action Day today & the focus is on POVERTY.
What is BLOG ACTION DAY all about?
“Blog Action Day is an annual nonprofit event that aims to unite the world’s bloggers, podcasters and videocasters, to post about the same issue on the same day. Our aim is to raise awareness and trigger a global discussion. Global issues like poverty are extremely complex. There is no simple, clear answer. By asking thousands of different people to give their viewpoints and opinions, Blog Action Day creates an extraordinary lens through which to view these issues. 
Poverty (also called penury) is deprivation of common necessities that determine the quality of life, including food, clothing, shelter and safe drinking water, and may also include the deprivation of opportunities to learn, to obtain better employment to escape poverty, and/or to enjoy the respect of fellow citizens. 
Food Poverty
Food poverty can be defined as the inability to access a nutritionally adequate diet and the related impacts on health, culture and social participation. Food poverty is not just about the consumption of too little food to meet basic nutritional requirements. It includes social and cultural contexts where people cannot eat, shop for, provide or exchange food in the manner that is the acceptable norm in society.
This is just a small attempt to share my photo journey on a platform afforded by the BLOG ACTION DAY organisers. All these pictures were clicked on a single trip into the heart of New Delhi, the capital of India, & I didn’t have to go out of my way. I went armed with the camera & I found disparity in every frame.
Most of the pictures were taken in a span of 2 hours, 12-2 in the afternoon, some out of the moving car, & are a window to our world on ‘poverty & the man on the street’. Poverty & disparity exist, sometimes, in the most heart-wrenching forms, & don’t differentiate between the old & the young, women or men etc. The snapshots that follow are of people struggling to earn a living, each in their own manner. It isn’t easy to click poverty, or another fellow beings disparity. I was ashamed at times, almost fearful too; but my thought was that this could contribute towards evoking a larger collective conscience & compassion.
‘POVERTY & THE MAN ON THE STREET’…a journey
The journey was soul stirring & haunting in some ways. There seems to be so much to do & so little time. The gap seems to be growing larger & larger in some ways, & with the current economic situation, the goal has become more complex. Let’s get together in our own little ways, at the micro level, in our neighbourhoods, wherever; we can make a difference. It’s our collective responsibility to give back to the world.
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