answer it truthfully with no consequences?

 "though many are apatheists (from "apathy") who don't think it matters whether God exists or not, forty-one percent even of the unaffiliated say religion is important in their lives.7 Most of the "no religion" respondents are of the "l don't care" variety, while only four percent identify themselves as atheists or agnostics. The term "agnostic" was coined in 1870 by Thomas Huxley, who came to be known as "Darwin's bulldog." It has two basic senses: don't know but I'd like to find out," and "l don't know, I don't think I can know, and therefore I don't care to examine the evidence." Unlike agnostics, however, most "no religion" people feel they just haven't found the right religion for them. "

how many of these people were asked this question so that they can answer it truthfully with no consequences?

so where is Christianity popular?

To a thoughtful person, the question is not whether Christianity is unfashionable or old-fashioned. The question is whether it is true. 

that same guy says 
". If we live in Nigeria, Korea or China, Christianity seems a new and liberating idea. The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life reports that sub-Saharan Africa is the world's "most religious area." The percentage of people who say religion is very important to them ranges from ninety-eight percent in Senegal to sixty-nine percent in Botswana, compared with fifty-seven percent in the United States and much less in Europe"

so where is Christianity popular?
 in underdeveloped areas of the world!

Why is one rich and one poor?

 in India, a survey of women in Nagpur found that 13 percent of women had missed paid work because they were being beaten and abused in the home—that, on average, they had to miss a week and a half of work per incident. 25

Powerful people always and everywhere seek to grab complete control over government, undermining broader social progress for their own greed. Keep those people in check with effective democracy or watch your nation fail.”

Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora, have the same people, culture, and geography. Why is one rich and one poor? 

Being an atheist anywhere in this world is tough,specially in USA

"Most moral and pious people are supposed to be  (theists)Christians Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist " if you were to  believe  all the books written by all the  professors/mullahs /lamas./popes/monks/gurus  of the  various divinity schools

As a result, being an atheist is immoral and uncool in much of contemporary society.
 Human beings are egocentric, and for them, God exists to fulfill one's own ego. In many circles—someone who takes any religion seriously and logically can provoke mockery or even anger from others in the circle. Humans are very tribal, and religious belief is a good way to get oneself accepted or Kicked Out of certain tribes. When it comes to matters of religious belief, many people think they are making up their own mind when in reality they are simply going along with the group, whether the group is Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist or atheist. People  who are religious say that "In a materialist, consumerist society, belief in the transcendent (something beyond our senses) is difficult to maintain, and people find it pleasanter not to believe than to be ridiculed."
In reality, the  most  difficult thing to do  in this present  earth is to come out in the open and say you do not believe in  any religion and  that you do not  believe in the entity of  "God"

So much so many atheists at heart tend to fear the reactions of the general public and fail to express their nonbelief.
they try to either  keep silent or give  some  weak ass explanation  like  they  being agnostic or  they believe in  a nondenominational " Higher Power "

How many of theses things are true for the Indian legal.police system?

Ailing legal systems have been characterized by:

• Arbitrary prosecution and arrest;
• Abuse and torture of detainees on remand, potentially for months or even years until a case goes to trial – if indeed it ever does;
• Poor police training and pay;
• Poor legal training;
• Lack of vital resources and infrastructure;
• Defendants denied legal counsel;
• Trials conducted in a foreign language (e.g. English or Spanish rather than the relevant local language) which defendants neither speak nor understand;
• The absence of trial transcripts that could serve as a basis for a retrial.

"When we think of global poverty we readily think of hunger, disease, homelessness, illiteracy, dirty water, and a lack of education, but very few of us immediately think of the global poor’s chronic vulnerability to violence— the massive epidemic of sexual violence, forced labor, illegal detention, land theft, assault, police abuse, and oppression that lies hidden underneath the more visible deprivations of the poor."

"—the reality of common, criminal violence in otherwise stable developing countries that affl icts far more of the global poor on a much larger and more persistent scale—and consistently frustrates and blocks their climb out of poverty." 

 

"law enforcement systems in the developing world are so broken that global studies now confi rm that most poor people live outside the protection of law. Indeed, the justice systems in the developing world make the poor poorer and less secure. It’s as if the world woke up to fi nd that hospitals in the developing world actually made poor people sicker—or the water systems actually contaminated the drinking water of the poor"

"The Locust Effect then is the surprising story of how a plague of lawless violence is destroying two dreams that the world deeply cherishes: the dream to end global poverty and to secure the most fundamental human rights for the poor. But the book also reveals several surprising stories about why basic justice systems in the developing world came to be so dysfunctional. It turns out that when the colonial powers left the developing world a half a century ago, many of the laws changed but the law enforcement systems did not—systems that were never designed to protect the common people from violence but to protect the regime from the common people. These systems, it turns out, were never re-engineered."

For example the use of Sedition laws recently in  India on students and critics of the Government

"Moreover, great signs of hope are profiled in a variety of demonstration projects being carried out by IJM and other agencies around the world that demonstrate it is possible to transform broken public justice systems in the developing world so they effectively protect the poor from violence." 

Something like this is needed in India 

" To establish a rural medical clinic in the area where Gopinath is held as a slave without addressing the violent forces that refuse to allow him to leave the quarry and take his dying kid to a doctor seems like a mocking."

" To provide Laura and Mariamma with AIDS education and training on making safe sexual choices without addressing the violence in the slums and brick factories where women don’t get to make choices seems like a mocking"

“In many developing countries, high levels of crime and violence not only undermine people’s safety on an everyday level, they also undermine broader development efforts to improve governance and reduce poverty.” 9  

" Perhaps if the locusts of violence laid waste to everything all at once like they did in the Midwest in 1875 it would get the world’s att ention—but all the daily slavery, rape, extortion, and dispossession gnaws its way through hundreds of millions of poor people one assault at a time, and the cumulative disaster of the locust eff ect is hard to see. Slowly but surely, however, the experts are starting to add it up, and the price tag is staggering"

 from 

"The locust effect" by Gary A. Haugen and Victor Boutros

New states might be poor, it was thought, but they would hold their own by virtue of being independent.

"The current collapse has its roots in the vast proliferation of nation-states, especially in Africa and Asia, since the end of World War II. When the United Nations Charter was signed in 1945, it had 50 signatories. Since that time, membership has more than tripled, reflecting the momentous transformation of the pre-war colonial world to a globe composed of independent states. During that period, now nearing its conclusion following the independence of Namibia in 1990, the U.N. and its member states made the "self-determination of peoples" — a right enshrined in the U.N. Charter — a primary goal.

Self-determination, in fact, was given more attention than long-term survivability. All agreed that the new states needed economic assistance, and the U.N. encouraged institutions like the World Bank and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to help them. But fundamental to the notion of decolonization was the idea that peoples could best govern themselves when free from the shackles, or even the influences, of foreigners. The idea, then, that states could fail — that they could be simply unable to function as independent entities — was anathema to the raison d’être of decolonization and offensive to the notion of self-determination. New states might be poor, it was thought, but they would hold their own by virtue of being independent."

"

FLASHBACK

Saving Failed States

How the United Nations let countries fall apart -- and how it needs to adapt if it wants to put them back together. (Originally published in the Winter 1992-1993 issue of Foreign Policy.)

BY GERALD B. HELMAN, STEVEN R. RATNER

 | JUNE 15, 2010, 6:19 PM"

" It was my first massacre site. Today the skulls are all neatly stacked on shelves, but when I  first encountered them, they definitely were not. They were attached to bodies—mostly skeletal remains—in a massive mess of rotting human corpses in a small brick church in Rwanda. As the director of the tiny United Nations “Special Investigations Unit” in Rwanda immediately following the genocide in 1994, I was given a list of 100 mass graves and massacre sites across an impoverished, mountainous country where nearly a million people had been slaughtered—mostly by machete—in a span of about 10 weeks."

http://www.thelocusteffect.com/Preview.pdf

Cambodia VS Congo what is the difference? Why do certain countries bounce back from utter devastation and others remain failed states?

 Why do certain countries bounce back from utter devastation and others remain failed states?

this  would be  a very interesting  study to make 

Ardu station of Kisangani in Democratic republic Cango Vs the Bamboo train of Combodia.

Following colonial ways slavishly VS using native intelligence, breaking some old rules and making new and more useful rules.
( rules  are  a necessary evil) like  " who should dismantle, when two bamboo trains come face to face"


"The trip began with a ride on the bamboo train, called a norry. After the Khmer Rouge left the transport system in complete disrepair, Cambodians developed this rudimentary system for transporting people and goods. At first, they operated by using poles and muscle but now they have small motors, and the trains are largely used for the tourists."

"Luckily the track is arrow-straight, because when trains coming from opposite directions meet up, both drivers stop and choose one train’s passengers to disembark. The drivers lift the train to one side (seating area, motor and wheels), allow the other train to go by, and then reassemble the other train. It all takes about a minute, and is typically done 5-6 times during one journey."

Anthony Bourdain, CNN

"Whispering, come and find out."

"Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings."

"Even extreme grief may ultimately vent itself in violence—but more generally takes the form of apathy."

-- Joseph Conrad, "Heart of Darkness"

It is the most relentlessly f***ed-over nation in the world, yet it has long been my dream to see Congo. And for my sins, I got my wish. Anthony Bourdain 

Occupying an ungovernable mass of land the size of all Western Europe combined, the Democratic Republic of Congo should be the richest country in Africa. It possesses the equivalent of trillions of dollars in resources: diamonds, gold, coltan (which the whole world requires for cell phones), minerals, timber, probably oil, uranium and hydroelectric power. In short, it has everything that the first world needs and desires. This is its curse.

But from before its beginnings, it has been ravaged by greed.

Stripped of its population by Arab and Portuguese slavers, its tribal societies were devastated. Handed outright to Belgium's King Leopold II for his personal exploitation, nearly half its population were worked to death, whipped, dismembered, executed outright or sent running into the bush to die of starvation and disease in a pitiless quest for first ivory and then rubber.

The Belgians who followed left behind a deliberately uneducated governing class and a few sergeants. The Congolese people then made the very untimely tactical mistake of democratically electing a socialist president in the midst of the nuclear arms race between East and West.

The CIA and MI-6 conspired to assassinate him (whether they succeeded directly is open to debate; what certainly is very clear is that he was killed), eventually installing in his place Joseph Mobutu, a man of spectacular rapaciousness, brutality and megalomania.

At one point, having looted the country of billions and having allowed what infrastructure remained to largely rot into the forest, Mobutu's army complained of not being paid.

The president-for-life's response was to point out that they had guns and to suggest that they take what they needed from the already desperate population. This is an attitude that prevails today.

War in Rwanda, next door, left Congo with hundreds of thousands of refugees, many of them genocidal Hutus, living within its borders -- and a neighboring Tutsi government uninclined towards either sympathy or good behavior (as Mobutu had been a staunch supporter of the Hutu, who had enthusiastically slaughtered up to 800,000 of their Tutsi neighbors in a period of only a few short weeks).

Ensuing civil wars have cost the country millions of lives.

The Menstrual Man; 'You would look down on me anyway’“But in India, we have a saying – we live in many centuries,”

“But in India, we have a saying – we live in many centuries,” 

“He had nothing to lose,” he says. “When you’re uneducated, you’re not afraid to look foolish. When you are educated, you start being concerned with looking like you know what you’re talking about. As Muruganantham said, ‘You would look down on me anyway’ so there’s no loss in trying.”

 “It’s a kind of new Indian woman – she’s done with being quiet and meek.”

I hope this is for real, and not just to be used by daughters-in-law who marry against their wishes and then use the law meant to protect the women to punish the inlaws.

“But in India, we have a saying – we live in many centuries,” 
this is so true,

On one hand, we have women of the 21st century who are more worried about  their Gucci bags and then there are women in the18th century, whose lives have  remained  unchanged"


 Just think if this man Arunachalam Muruganantham was educated what would have happened?

people may say he would have found better and easier ways to achieve what he achieved.
I would say he would have just become a 4thclass or a 3rd class karmachari in some Government office in Tamilnadu.
It is your way of thinking which is more important than literacy

National Health Protection Scheme (NHPS) ,shame on you Jaitlie and Modi!

So you come down from  free and universal health coverage to1.2 Billion Indians to
 "hospitalisation coverage of Rs 5 lakh a year to 100 million poor and vulnerable families, or 500 million Indians."
and call this "take health protection to a more aspirational level."

"India ranks 154 out of 195 countries in terms of access to healthcare, worse than Bangladesh, Nepal, Ghana and Liberia. India's government expenditure on healthcare (1.15 per cent of the GDP) is among the lowest in the world. India faces a desperate shortage in health infrastructure and manpower: there are 0.7 hospital beds per 1,000 Indians (should be 1:1,000) and 0.6 doctors per 1,000 Indians (should be 1:1,000). There is 1 nurse per 2,500 Indians, compared to 1 for every 150-200 in richer countries. There is close to a 40 per cent shortage of medical teachers in its 472 medical colleges. India needs 65 million surgeries a year, but only 26 million are carried out. The country has the world's highest disease burden-700 Million DALY (Disability-Adjusted Life Year) units (or years lost due to premature death, disability, poor quality of life) and a WHO estimate says India's economic burden just from non-communicable diseases will be $6.2 trillion between 2012 and 2030."

"district collectors have been roped in to incentivise doctors to come and work in rural areas, salaries upto Rs 30 lakh a year are being offered, along with multi-skilled, bridge courses with tele-medicine facilities in the pipeline to upgrade the skills of healthcare professionals."

So these "Doctors" will be quacks who complete the proposed "Bridge" course by the "Ayush" department?

why is the Indian media so shallow?
instead of going back to see what is proposed is at least  100 times if not 1000 less ambitious than what was proposed during the first decade of independence. 

In spite of all the vitriol poured by the USA on  Castro's Cuba, it is a shining example of good healthcare for everyone and good education for everyone. 

we need to learn from them