For a few dollars more...

I can not help but remember a show by Russell Peters, a stand-up comedian, where he emphasizes the importance of one dollar for a Chinese merchant during a hilarious conversation between him and an Indian buyer. For extracting a good laugh, a dollar might be used as an insignificant entity, but for millions of people in Africa who are dying of AIDS due to abject poverty, a dollar means the difference between life and death.

We live in a world of air conditioned homes with plush interiors and abundant to eat and perhaps even more to waste. Do we ever recognize the fact that for every dollar we waste, there's a life getting wasted somewhere in Africa?

You must be wondering as to why am I stressing so much on a dollar. Well, for one, it's the per diem cost of the retroviral drugs that fight against the deadly AIDS virus. Statistically, half of the population of Africa is dying due to their impecunious state. Because they cannot afford that dollar a day to give them a fresh lease of life. Because the aid that's directed to them either is too meager or gets lost in the rampant corruption, somewhere. Because we'd rather spend that dollar on chicken nuggets than save a life. It's a situation which is not waiting to explode, it's an explosion that has failed to reach our deaf ears.

Ironically, US is facing another kind of epidemic, one that exists due to people being overfed. It's called obesity and yeah a dollar does make the definitve blow here too, only this time it manifests by the name of 'dollar menu'. That's another name for all the junk that McDonalds and it's fast-food cronies sell under the garb of cheap affordable food.

Living with this dichotomy, if I were to extract a moral from this story, would it be that Dollar kills both in its abundance and its shortage or perhaps I have had too much of Russell Peters lately!

(First in a series of posts that follow on this subject)