| > But the homeless person in Delhi will still commisserate with the homeless person in Toronto Perhaps, but it's worth pointing out that these experiences are qualitatively different. In India, being poor (especially if you're a certain caste) is tantamount to being non-human. You can be jailed, raped, mistreated, killed without consequence. Even the middle class is afforded little human dignity, the underclass have no real hope. The homeless in Toronto can still get some government services without bribery. On top of that, there's the whole matter of caste which won't go away even if you win the lottery. Someone else here is saying that dating poor in Switzerland is the same as in Delhi...that comes across as unbelievably tone deaf. Perhaps they missed the part in TFA where this couple has to date far away from the home. You can get beaten up or killed for being seen with the "wrong person" (in this case same gotra), and it does happen - quite often. So it's not as simple as absolute and relative poverty in my opinion (though that is a good thought and is definitely part of it). Risking another bad analogy, I would perhaps compare it to being the lowest class of worker in a Walmart versus being at the bottom of the org chart in Netflix. You can both commiserate on how bad your managers are, but your lived experiences are not remotely the same. |
Being in poverty but of a high caste in India, is pretty-standard "absolute poverty."
Meanwhile, being well-off but of a low caste in India, is more like being a recently-freed black slave in the ante-bellum southern US.
That experience is really nothing like absolute or relative poverty. It's its own kind of horrible. (It's an orthogonal poverty, one could say.)
It does lead to a vicious cycle that connects it to absolute/relative poverty, though, since having no societal respectability means people aren't willing to offer you any opportunities to better your situation, because they think badly of you and expect you to squander them.
But I would say it is nevertheless best to think of a low-caste homeless person in Delhi as having three distinct problems: relative poverty, absolute poverty, and poverty of societal-respectability.
I would note that, while a regular homeless person in Toronto might not know anything about the sheer inhumanity of being of a low caste in India, a drug-addicted homeless person working as a prostitute to feed their addiction would actually understand it somewhat. In both cases, for example, if someone in these groups gets murdered or otherwise wronged, the police don't even bother to investigate — so they have no access to justice. The low-caste homeless in Delhi and the crack-addicted streetwalker in Toronto would see the same looks on people's faces, and understand them to mean the same thing.