Yesterday Jared showed me some pictures he took of the railway children in Kolkota.

Anything that I say in attempts to describe my thoughts towards this issue is not going to be new. Its not going to be something you have not already heard. I thought about this, and it bothered me even more- the fact that the "more fortunate" children have heard this so many times over its like a mantra to them us. About how there are children our age in another part of the world that barely have food to eat, or don't have the chance to go to school, or work as bonded labourers to pay off their parents' debts. Then these children look in the papers, and see pictures of starving african children, who have protruding bones and eyes brimming with sadness.

They see these pictures too often.

And this results in development pornography. People keep seeing these pictures. Over and over and over, and it creates an image of these sad race of dark skinned-people waiting silently for help from the rich whites of the world. And you know whats the worst part? It works.

Billions of dollars come pouring in, through aid agencies and NGOs throughout the world. This is what happened in the Ethiopian famine in 1984. The problem lies in the fact that aid is not sustainable- the more money comes in, the more people rely on it. Not to say the people who rely on this aid are at fault. Its not them who take the pictures of themselves and build an image of Africa as a broken continent. The whole entire continent has been reduced to a place with no hope, if not for aid. This image is not the root of the problem, but it is close to it.

I read an article with this line that struck me-

"Oxfam’s Davis said pictures from Africa were often selected using totally different standards to those that would normally apply elsewhere.

For example, he said, picture editors would usually think at least three times before publishing photographs of naked children, unless they were African famine victims.

“But naked famine’s okay, it seems,” Davis said."

And as i read all this, i realised that this is not even a branch of the main problem of poverty that plagues so many people in the world today. Development Pornography is just one cause of this. There are so many, that result in poverty. The web is so complex and so complicated. Anything is, when the human heart and mind are involved. In issues like this, it is very difficult to isolate the the reason and the rational side, from all the emotion that sometimes chokes and blinds us. What holds our reins? Our emotion, or our logic? How do we decide? Is it a balance, then? Where is the line drawn? Its more complicated than I could ever imagine.

But when Jared showed me those pictures- it looked very simple to me. The fact that he went all the way to Kolkota, to take pictures of these children showed me that the world isn't as ugly as I make it out to be sometimes. Because somewhere, in some corner, you find people who are genuine enough to want to make a difference. The fact that these boys were smiling in these pictures, and that there are organisations that are making an effort to make this smile real, and not just for the pictures that were taken, calms me a little. Because atleast there are people who have their hearts in the right place. And, as stupid as it may sound, that's the absolute essential fundamental thing you need to go anywhere.