The perils of unfettered imagination

...is illuminated by the parable of Chicken Little.

The story goes thus:

An acorn falls on Chicken Little’s head, and she decides the sky is falling. Other animals are warned in turn — Henny Penny, Ducky Lucky, Goosey Loosey, Turkey Lurkey — until they are all eaten in their panic by Foxy Loxy, who sees an unparalleled gustatory opportunity. There are a number of staggering what-ifs. What if Chicken Little had asked for additional evidence that the sky was falling? What if Henny Penny or Goosey Loosey had been more skeptical of Chicken Little’s claims? You can’t fault Chicken Little for a lack of imagination, but the fable is a warning against unfettered credulity — and imagination. If Chicken Little had reacted to the falling acorn with greater equanimity, she might still be alive today — along with many, if not all of her barnyard friends.

Living within a contagion of chaos

In The Locust Effect, Gary A. Haugen and Victor Boutros claim, and I believe rightly so, that it's not simply poverty that people in the developing world suffer from, but an acute lack of security.

Violence is rampant in many parts of the world that are also poor. However, when experts in the developed world device plans to alleviate problems in the developing nations, they typically focus on economic measures, convinced that scarcity is the biggest challenge in these countries.

Scarcity is indeed a big challenge, according to the authors, but a bigger challenge is fear. A majority of these nations have no functional institutions of law, order and justice, in place, and if there are police and courts, they serve to protect, not the people, but the regimes against the people. The elites of the developing world have successfully bought the services of the police and judiciary to their advantage.

The tale of Yuri, an 8-year old Peruvian girl, doomed to live in a country "marked by disorder, violence and man-inflicted suffering", says it all. In his discussion of the book, David Brooks quotes the story:

Yuri's body was found in the street one morning, her skull crushed in, her legs wrapped in cables and her underwear at her ankles. The evidence pointed to a member of one of the richer families in the town, so the police and prosecutors destroyed the evidence. Her clothing went missing. A sperm sample that could have identified the perpetrator was thrown out. A bloody mattress was sliced down by a third, so that the blood stained spot could be discarded.

Yuri’s family wanted to find the killer, but they couldn’t afford to pay the prosecutor, so nothing was done. The family sold all their livestock to hire lawyers, who took the money but abandoned the case.

Brooks brings to our attention the gist of the books' perspective-altering argument that "The primary problem of politics is not creating growth. It’s creating order. Until that is largely achieved, life can be nasty, brutish and short."

Life is "nasty, brutish and short" in many parts of the world's places where the average citizen lives beyond the apparatus of law and order, and are victims of "predatory behavior, [and] the passions of domination and submission."

The doodle I missed

To celebrate the 92nd birth anniversary of ace Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray, Google India had doodled in a memorable scene from Ray's best known 1955 film, Pather Panchali (the "Story of the Road")--that of the brother and sister duo of Apu and Durga running across the rural landscape to catch a glimpse of the train that crossed through their village. 

The train was a magical sight to the siblings, who couldn't eat two meals a day, so acute was the poverty in which the family, and in a rural Bengal depicted in the film, lived.

Below is a scene of Durga and Apu from Pather Panchali.