A billion people in the world live on a dollar a day or less.   One billion.  One dollar.  Both those numbers of so extreme that some days I feel like I can’t really get my mind around those numbers.

I just poured $2.75 into a parking meter (note to people coming to San Francisco:  always keep a handy a large stash of quarters in your car because, really, it is shocking how little just one quarter in a parking meter will get you these days). In many parts of the world, my parking meter money would be almost three days of living expenses.

So to better understand what it means to live on $1 a day, allow me to take some facts from an MIT Poverty Lab report and make a hypothetical person out of them.  Let me introduce you to Neelu.  Neelu, with long dark hair and a twinkle in her eye, is my hypothetical person who embodies what it means to live on $1 a day in northern India, in a small village in Udaipur.  We’re just a couple of hours away from New Delhi, the modern capital, but in some sense, a couple of centuries away as we time warp out of modernity the further our car takes us from the paved cow-filled roads of Delhi. (more…)

It is October. All over India, people clebrate Navarathri -nine nights dedicated to the veneration of the divine feminine Shakti, meaning sacred force, power or energy.  Shakti is the spirit of action, of movement, the dynamic principle through which the divine is manifest in the world. During Navarathri she is celebrated as Durga (power), Saraswati (the essence of self) and Lakshmi (prosperity). 

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