poverty does disfigure morality!

It can only be termed outrageous that a third grade tabloid of Britain publishes a fabricated story about Oscar kid Rubina Ali being put on sale by her parents and the world start looking at them with wide eyes and say ‘how can someone do that to his/her own kid?’ hah…First of all this tabloid ‘news of the world’ is a gossip tabloid. Mainly people read it to peep into the spicy side of celebrities…just for the sake of some entertainment. Nobody takes it so seriously as Indian news channels have. Secondly, if you watch that video which is supposedly shot during the sting operation of tabloid’s reporter, it hardly says anything. It is impossible to find out from video they have put out that whether they are doing a film deal or trying to sell their own kid. Tabloid will never be able to prove their side of story if someone files a case against them. But they know that no one will. Poor of India are harmless and can be made fun of…

And even if this story is true, doesn’t it look ugly? Rich of the world trying to make fun of poor…making them laughing stock and then finally casting surprise. No one likes the idea of a father selling off his daughter but it was nevertheless a cheap, vulgar, contemptible stunt by the tabloid to entrap Qureshi.

A privileged reporter from a wealthy country flies into a Mumbai slum to trick or persuade an impoverished and illiterate man to trade in his daughter for a better life for her and his whole family. It is the abyss between the two that is troubling. If the paper had picked on someone who could defend himself, the sting operation would have been less repugnant.

When the News of World exposes the moral frailties of celebrities or powerful personalities in the West, no unpleasant taste lingers in the mouth. These are people who can look after themselves.
But for a foreigner who has probably never experienced the inconvenience of a 30-minute power cut in his whole life and pass moral judgement on an impoverished, vulnerable, slum-dweller is sickening.

Obviously, it never occurred to him that poverty can disfigure morality. When all you have known is squalor, hunger, no running water, no shred of comfort at home after a day’s work, panic at the thought of your children falling ill and not having enough money for medicines, and feeling degraded to the core by living conditions that would be deemed unfit for animals in the West, it can affect your moral sensibility. This is not to say that the poor are less moral than the rich. But verily it is generally easier for the rich to enjoy a higher level of moral hygiene than the poor.
Moral ground does shake when one has to choose among four of his kids that whom to send school and whom to send out to earn money. When one has to choose between getting medicine for his ill mother or sick child then morality does shake. Who are we to condemn them as morally reprehensible?