Why am I not an Indian laborer?

Every morning I stand in my bedroom and look out the window as I put on my button-down shirt and tie the noose - I mean tie - around my neck. My view is of a house getting built - which, of course, is the job of Indian laborers from West Bengal...with their thick black hair cut in good-boy hairstyles, lithe bodies, and slightly bell-bottomed pants. Bengalis here are the labor equivalent of Mexicans back home. My guess is that their pay ranges somewhere between $2 and $3 a day for 12 hours of backbreaking labor, building houses for affluent Bhutanese in the most unmechanized way imaginable in 2009.

Every morning I think, "Why am I tying a tie around my white neck and these guys are carrying cloth bags of wet concrete to and fro from 7am to 10pm everyday? The inequality and seeming randomness of who gets what in life - because I am some genetic outcome of two Americans rather than two people from Cooch Behar -- is inescapable. This awareness is nothing new -- in fact, it's totally cliche - what do you do with it? The point is, it haunts me like a sinister shadow...always there. Just walking here this morning, I walked by a guy carrying empty bottles to sell for maybe $1 . Over my shoulder, I carried my $2,000 Apple computer. Every day. Maybe I am thinking about this more than usual because of a more shocking than normal discovery yesterday.

As readers know, I am working on a rural development initiative. I finally saw some raw data yesterday. All of these villages -- like so many here -- are not on the road system. Most of the 10 we are working with are 2-4 days walk from the road. 4 days?!! With washed out bridges, flooded rivers, leeches along the way. Their income? As low as 17 US cents per day per capita. I mean, c'mon? Are you kidding me? A family of 7 that earns US$80 a year? Another family that earns 60 US cents in a month cash....this is subsistence at the most vulnerable level possible. Regardless of how far they support their needs outside of the cash economy, one shock -- a drought, a flood, a wild boar attacking the crops - and off the edge you go.

How did we get here? Where I have relatively boundless resources while young Indian men toil away, away from home and family, for pennies an hour? Although I wish I could just spread billions around personally, I'll never have enough money to just support everyone...so when I get caught up in the technical aspects of looking at program systems and impact assessments, I sometimes think...."you know what, this is just a matter of will. It's a matter of human generosity, of making the right choices in homes and in policy in the North." I think, "we can land someone on the moon (and pay billions to fix a toilet on the space station) and we can't get oral rehydration salts to villages in India."

And, that's it...that's why I believe in GNH - whether it gets successfully operationalized or not it promotes an important worldview. Because development and alleviation of suffering isn't primarily a function of technical development practices. It's about our commitment to each other as one collective humanity. Our abandonment of self in favor of our oneness. I don't know how it's going to happen but unless our consciousness gets lifted, we won't escape this -- and we certainly won't escape its active production.

As sure as the sun will rise, on Monday I will wake up, look out the window again, and wonder why I am not there hauling concrete. And, after all my travels, I sometimes think -- what the hell do you know about all these lives your eyes only glimpse? I just don't know what I don't know about what's messed up about my lot.