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No Consequence

We had rented a car with driver for the duration of our India trip. A turned out to be cheerful guy eager to show us around and recommend the best places for local food - all of which turned out to be excellent. As with most folks back home, he is versed in local and national level politics, holds strong opinions and is not shy about airing them. Neither is my father. So they naturally hit it off and traded gossip, speculation and preposterous claims about things they could not possibly know anything about. 

But it is the confidence with which the statements are made that matters. This kind of idle yet earnest chatter between strangers has always been common in India and it was nice to see that remains unchanged. The politicians are as always a thieving, lying, and conniving bunch but they accidentally do some good for the citizenry. A had no interest in American politics and and he did not care to hear or read news coming out of this part of the world. He did not see that its relevant to his life's concerns - he drives tourists around the country and is on the road over three hundred days a year. His family farms both rice and wheat which serves as their second source of income. 

Business is good and he now has a fleet of five cars and he drives one of them. The other drivers are his relatives - one being his younger brother who picked us up from the airport when we arrives. Keeps money in the family as he explained and with their homes being close together, the wives and kids left behind when the men are driving clients, support each other. I am going to guess folks like A have no idea what aid India was getting from America and it would matter nothing to them to know it would no longer be forthcoming. In the streets of the cities we visited, I could discern no signs that those most in need of help had received any from home or abroad. Money was likely misappropriated well before that. The author of the story makes a great point about the aid being tainted by colonizing tendencies that should only be unwelcome

The aid industry, in effect, inherited colonialism’s “civilising mission”. Its do-gooder image papers over the extractive nature of the international system and attempts to ameliorate its worst excesses without actually challenging the system. If anything, the two are in a symbiotic relationship. The aid industry legitimises extractive global trade and governance systems, which in turn produce the outcomes that legitimise the existence of the aid agencies.

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