On my twitter timeline, while I was scrounging for the IPL results (because CricInfo refused to open quickly enough), I saw a tweet by a person I was following: “9 million rand for children’s education. 18 million rand for the fireworks. #ipl” I wouldn’t like to mention the person by name here because I don’t think he knows I’m writing this; anyway, I find something fundamentally wrong with his statement.
Everyone knows it’s easier to question than to answer. Anything can be questioned – from motives to massacres. But answering to them and correctly requires information, knowledge and wisdom. Not every question has a right answer, but wrong answers will always exist. Questions are free from that constraint. A question can never be wrong unless it is a waste of time, and in this case, that’s what it seems to be to me. Mr. K here has obviously referred to the South African government’s decision to spend R 18m ($2.2m) while its national expenditure on education is half of that.
I now ask Mr. K to step into the shoes of the government’s head and answer a few questions from me, the first one being “Would you rather make sure that all that you spend in every other sector of development in your country is always less than or equal what you spend on eradicating hunger or educating your children?” If Mr. K answers in the affirmitive, then that is agreeably a bad decision.
All dollars are dollars. The money spent on education is no different than the money spent on tourism. The money spent in trying to make rich people happy does not have to bow down to the dollar spent in getting a little kid his first story book. It is a fact, and people have to learn to make peace with it. Eventually, it is the rich man’s dollar that will be paying for the little kid’s lunch. As soon as a nation is erected from the mind of a leader and the soil of the earth, it will be like every other nation that has been born so. Hunger and illiteracy will attempt to strike it down. What will you then do? Pour all your money into alleviating the suffering of the victimized or divide it between the people who need it and the people who are capable of giving you more?
Clathration Therapy 