Take a step back and be thankful

Today a “memory” popped up on Facebook that made me think and I’m sharing it below. We should all be reminded now and again that by a happy accident of birth we were born in a prosperous part of the world. It’s so easy to moan about our lot when we should all be thankful for how fortunate we are.

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Too true, add on running drinkable water, electricity, health services and of course education. I have visited parts of the world that have none of these. A real eye opener and true that travel broadens the mind. When I returned to Europe around Christmas time after seeing how others live it was a shock to the system to discover how the shops were filled with so many toys, chocolates and other ‘indespensible items’ .
I also feel that I am very lucky to have been born in an age where I haven’t known war or want.

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I visited India in 1998 and the poverty was truly staggering. And on such an enormous scale. It’s humbling and horrifying when you see people scavenging on rubbish dumps or pooing in the streets.

I will never forget it.

And this is how you think Brexit may end up?!

I am hoping to visit India as it looks to be a facinating country.

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You should visit Mat. It’s an incredible place although much changed now I understand with a growing economy and more prosperity. I imagine rural India may be less changed. The wildlife is magical.

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Would love to visit Rajasthan, did you get to visit that part Mandy ?

Sadly not, we only had 2 weeks and needed to prioritise.

I went with a friend who wanted to see tigers in the wild and I was very happy to accompany her. We stayed at Kipling Camp on the edge of Kanha National Park for a week (Madhya Pradesh). It was awe inspiring. We saw lots of wildlife on our daily jungle visits and even saw several wild tigers. We even met Tara there and her story is on the attached link.

And, of course, you can’t go to India without visiting the Taj Mahal and we spent 2 days in Agra (Uttar Pradesh). Magical place.

Rest of the time was in Delhi with a few trips out to Fatehpur Sikri and the Red Fort.

http://www.kiplingcamp.com/intro.html

Yesterday would have been my dad’s 92nd birthday. He was born in India as was his mother. Her parents were Irish farmers who had emigrated to India who supplied pork to the British Indian army, his father was a British soldier. I would have loved to visit India with either my father or grandmother as they always spoke so fondly about their time there. My grandmother lived in India until her late 60s at which point she moved to live with my aunt in Battersea. She hated London and soon went back to India for another decade before returning to Britain, to Dursley where she spent the rest of her days sharing a small house with one of her sisters.

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Oh David you should go. I’m sure it would be wonderful to visit some of their old haunts. And the Taj Mahal should be on everyone’s bucket list. Breathtaking, especially at sunrise.

My aunt, the one in Battersea, self published a book about her life there so Ibcan imagine what they experienced. My dad had three sisters, he and his eldest sister moved back to England to attend school there when they were quite young, the other two sisters grew up in India. He was always closer to his older sister than the other two and was particularly close to the great aunts that he had stayed with in Yorkshire during his school holidays.

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I used to work in India, the real shock is the contrast between the haves and have-nots. That for me is the definition of a 3rd world country, that gap. Britain is getting that way. I saw it for the first time in Egypt and it is the same but on a larger scale in India.

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I appreciate what we have here everytime I look at our view.
Much poverty is caused by corruption, greed and and general incompetence.
I see Britain going down tge drain because of pigheaddness and stupidity.

Mat, that is rather a stupid comment don’t you think? Britain may end up poorer but it certainly won’t end up with people ‘pooing’ in the streets, or scavenging rubbish heaps. Keep all that in mind when you get to India and then imagine that in some of the leafy avenues of England.

Now now Elizabeth. This is a friendly forum and there is no need to be impolite.

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As the great philosopher Forrest Gump once said “stupid is as stupid does”.

… certainly not wrong in my case!

I aspire to be as stupid as Forrest Gump.:grinning:

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Especially considering what came before. It was also a strange reaction to the question that Mat asked.

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Like many I suspect, I would not be here now without antibiotics…

I enjoy watching period dramas and this feeds a long held desire to be able to travel through time to be the ‘fly on the wall’…I am in no doubt though that I would want these visits to be brief , manly on the basis of the lack of good healthcare …
It is incredible that with the amount of money being pumped in over many years, via Governmental aid and the many charities to all the projects that have been running, that we seem to be still just scratching the surface of getting people even the basics…
One thing is sure (and hs be echoed by charity workers on TV), we should not give aid to foreign governments who prefer to spend their money on nuclear.space programmes/ fleets of Rolls-Royces, rather than the welfare of their poor people…