I Think It's This Congenital Problem With

I Think It's This Congenital Problem With Journalism That We Oversell The Difference We Make. We Make Small Differences.

One Chronicler Writes Of An Area Of India During The End Of The 20th Century: Almost No-one In This Slum Was Poor By Indian Benchmarks. ... True, A Few Residents Trapped Rats And Frogs And Fried Them For Dinner. A Few Ate The Scrub Grass At The Sewage Lake Edge. And These Individuals, Miserable Souls, Thereby Made An Inestimable Contribution To Their Neighbors. They Gave Those Slum Dwellers Who Didn't Fry Rats And Eat Weeds A Sense Of Their Upward Mobility.

...much Of What Was Said Did Not Matter, And That Much Of What Mattered Could Not Be Said.

I'm Useless When I Meet Writers I Love - I Go Slack-jawed And Stupid With Awe.

As A Reporter, You Know The Tropes Of How Stories On Poverty Work In Any Country. A Reporter Will Go To An Ngo And Say, "tell Me About The Good Work That You're Doing And Introduce Me To The Poor People Who Represent The Kind Of Help You Give." It Serves To Streamline The Storytelling, But It Gives You A Lopsided Cosmos In Which Almost Every Poor Person You Read About Is Involved With A Ngo Helping Him. Our Understanding Of Poverty And How People Escape From Poverty, In Any Country, Is Quite Distorted.