How does it feel to be extremely poor?

Answer by Pritam Kumar:

I am the son of a woman who cleans other people’s hoouse. I lost my father at a tender age of 7. Feeding us(Me and My younger brother) from the meagre money she earns became difficult to cover our basic needs. We used to live on a single meal per day, sometimes twice when my Mom took the half-eaten meals left on the dinner plate from others house. My family suffers from malnutrition and we are all emaciated. Our house was mud-walled and had a grass-thatched roof, which would leak terribly when the rain falls. The rain brought with them the Anopheles mosquitoes which transmitted malaria. I was the most vulnerable to malaria infections in my family. I vividly remember once I was praying to God to take my soul while lying in the hospital bed when I was 10.

My Mom took me to a government school(Primary School) and got me admitted because she always encouraged us taking education seriously and said this is the only way we can come out from this situation. So I started taking my education seriously. Until 4th class I got free books from my primary school, when I passed 4th class, I have to join new school(Secondary School) from 5th as the previous school I were studied was having classes upto 4th. From 5th I must buy books and I have to walk 6km from my house to reach school. My Mom always reached out to people and asked books for my studies. This gave me lot of energy and a reason to work hard and do good in my studies and I maintained the top position in my class. My classmates were always bullying me because I always study in class even during my lunch time. Everybody got a lunch box to have lunch and when I felt hungry I went out and drank water to fill my stomach. They spoke about my dirty clothes, ripped bag but I never responded. I remember the day I asked my Mom that I have to pay exam fees to write board (10th) exam, she was not having money. Mom reached school and bow down in-front of principal but he refused to pay my exam fees, one of my class teacher paid my board exam fees. And I cleared 10th exam with 78% mark.  My mom was so proud of me and prepared Kheer(Sweet Dish) for all of us. And that’s the full stop of my studies. I had to stop chasing my dream knowing the facts that my Mom could not able to afford my further studies so I came to Bangalore from Jharkhand in search of a job with one person from my village who was working as a security guard in an apartment here in Bangalore. My Mom gave me Rs.50, but it was not sufficient to buy train ticket so I did not buy one but I had been warned that if I get caught by TTE, I would be thrown out from the train, I was lucky enough that I reached Bangalore without any problem.

I was searching for a job for 2 months but I did not get any so I went to nearest Railway station and started working as a Coolie, selling books and news paper.  I started earning enough money to feed myself 2 times and save Rs.10 everyday so I can send some money home. I was first recruited by a Book stall guy. I was assigned to sell the novels in one of the busiest traffic in Bangalore, I read novels when the signal is Green and started selling when it’s Red. I read almost 100 novels at that time. One day police caught me selling duplicate novels but when I told him the book stall owner asked me to do this job, he took me there but the stall owner refused to identify me but somehow I convinced the police officer that I was just selling it but I did not own them.

I left that job and came to a residential area and started washing cars for my livings. I still didn’t get any place to stay so I used to go to Railway Station everyday to sleep with my old friends over there.

Once while I was working in an apartment, one person came and asked me where I am from, for the first time in 2 years of my life in Bangalore, and also where do I stay and why I started working at this age when do I get time to study. I told him everything about me and as I can read, write and understand English, he offered me a typing job, in return he will teach me computer and give me a place to stay in his house. As I was very much passionate about computers, I agreed to that without thinking anything and offered a place to stay was like a icing on the cake.

He taught me how to use computer, internet, ms-office etc. I asked many questions about internet and gathered lot of information. I always had 4 hrs access to his system to get the work done, gradually I started to finish the work so early, in and around 2 hrs and during the remaining time I started learning programming and other stuff. I started dreaming again. I worked with him for 4 hrs and after that I started new jobs like cooking, washing vessels, cleaning houses of his friends to earn some money for some extra bucks. After 2 months when I started working on the programming, I got pretty much knowledge but it was once again a time for bad luck as the project he was working got completed. Now I did not have access to his system any-more. All my dreams were broken into pieces again. I was afraid to ask his computer as I could have lost the place where I was staying. I was cooking for 4 guys in a house and one guy was having a second hand laptop to sell. They were all working in TCS. I asked him about the price, first he asked me why? and said it’s not a car wash or cook food. I just said I want to learn programming so I want to have it. They started laughing so loudly and said we didn’t learn to programme in last 4 yrs of our engineering and how can you learn just like that. He said, anyway if you want to buy it then the price will be Rs.15000. I started working so hard to get that laptop for myself so that I can start to learning programming again. I was so excited. After 3 months of hardwork I gathered Rs.12000 and I asked him if he can give it to me and rest he can deduct from my salary. He said he can’t give me Rs. 3000 in advance. I asked other houses where I had been working for more than 6 months but nobody gave me loan of Rs.3000. I thought let me work for another month and take that laptop. After few days I heard my Mom was sick and hospitalised and needed Rs. 13000 so I had to transfer the money to my Mom.

I will definitely pursue my dream along with my work and I will be successful one day fighting all my odds.

Everyday I go to internet cafe and spend about 2 hrs to learn programming and found this very useful site Quora today. I feel like spending so much time reading answers.

This is my first answer on Quora, I don’t know whether I will be able to make you understand how does it feel like to be a poor but I can say that it’s a bitter-sweet journey so far but it made me so stronger. I hope I will complete my story with a good ending one day to inspire 100s of people who simply does not pursue their dream only because they are poor and do not have access to good schools and colleges.

EDIT: I am so privileged and honoured for this overwhelming response. I am so grateful to everyone who have reached out to me for help. I am speechless and I don’t know how to thank you all.

Clarification Asked by Rahul Pandey, Arti Agarwal and  Kaushik Mazumdar: I bought Samsung S4 few days back from my savings and got internet connection. I read Quora and wrote answers whole night yesterday. I goto Internet Cafe for 2 hrs only to learn programming from www.freecodecamp.com, where I can write code and test it in their site that I cant able to do it in my Mobile phone.

I want to reply each one of you Sir for your generous comments and messages tonight, Thank you for your time reading through my answer.
How does it feel to be extremely poor?

Tribute to Hayao Miyazaki
Music by Joe Hisaishi

Made with Blender, Gimp, Octane and Natron.

Thanks to Blackschmoll, Boby, Christophe, Clouclou, Cremuss, David, Félicia, Frenchman, Sozap, Stéphane, Virgil !
And Thanks to Ton Roosendaal, the Blender community, the developers of Blender, Gimp and Natron !

dono 2015

Tribute to Hayao Miyazaki from dono on Vimeo.

Tribute to Hayao Miyazaki
Music by Joe Hisaishi

Made with Blender, Gimp, Octane and Natron.

Thanks to Blackschmoll, Boby, Christophe, Clouclou, Cremuss, David, Félicia, Frenchman, Sozap, Stéphane, Virgil !
And Thanks to Ton Roosendaal, the Blender community, the developers of Blender, Gimp and Natron !

dono 2015

Why do people want to immigrate to the United States?

Answer by Feifei Wang:

I’m a Chinese American, my family and I immigrated to US some 10 years ago, and became citizen a few years later.

Here’s the reasons we decided to move to the US, I imagine these probably apply to many Chinese Americans as well:

  • Overall superior basic living conditions, which include: better air quality, cleaner water, greener cities and suburbs, better roads and bridges (they don’t collapse)… You can’t buy these thing in China, no matter how rich you are, you breathe the same polluted air like everyone else.
  • No poisoned food. Food safety is a huge problem in China. From street food to milk to restaurant food, you’re never sure if it’s safe. There’s a famous joke saying “You can’t honestly say you’re a Chinese unless you’ve eaten everything on the periodic table”. While in the US, the most you have to worry about are probably bad sushi and Monsanto.
  • Better, less exam-focused primary education system. This is probably one of the most important reasons many Chinese families try to move to the US. The elementary and middle schools in China are brutal. It’s heavily exam- driven, and it’s really not good for overall development of the child. There’s a lot of memorizing, a lot of test preparation. The last 3 years of high school is just a 3 year long exam preparation class for university entrance exam. There’s no way to  escape it, and many parents don’t want their children to be limited like that. Especially with the “one family,one child” policy. A lot of people tried to send their kids here to attend middle/high schools even if they themselves can not come over.
  • Better universities with more freedom. China has some pretty good universities, like Peking University and Tsinghua University. However, unless you did well in that once-in-a-lifetime university entrance exam, you won’t have other opportunities. US universities offers a lot more freedom, you can transfer department, or even universities. You can improve your GPA and go to a better university midway. This is a huge plus compared to the rigid Chinese universities.
  • Better grad schools. The reason I separate grad school and 4 year college is because it attracts different people. Going to US grad school is still the most accessible method to go to the US. It is very hard for a Chinese to apply for US Visa, and getting an F1 (Student Visa) through grad school is the cheapest way. And Chinese grad schools suffer from corruption like other Chinese organizations. Students don’t feel that they can do anything in grad school other than being the slave labor for their advisers. I guess US grad schools also have similar problems, but it’s a lot better.
  • Overall better social welfare system, especially if you can get green card or become a citizen. You can actually buy land and house (Chinese government only allows people to buy the use rights of a land, you don’t own the land or the house). If you rent, the landlord can drive you off anytime he/she wants (yeah… renting law in China sucks, reason why people want to own their own home). Better health care, better unemployment insurances, better domestic violence support, less corrupted justice system… overall, safer, easier to live in the US.
  • More freedom. This is a personal experience, but since I’m lucky that I entered the US with green card, so it may not be true to people who struggle with their visa. I think I have a lot more options to do what I want to do with my life. And the general ideology is that you can do whatever you want, be whoever you want, as long as you work hard and don’t give up. I’ll say regular Americans have better chance working towards their dream and succeed than regular Chinese people.

Now I sound like a total traitor, praising America over the motherland. US is not perfect, if it’s up to me, I’d live in one of those welfare states. But I really like being an American.
Why do people want to immigrate to the United States?

Why is there such a strong correlation between geographic distance from the equator and prosperity?

Answer by Sam Tanzer:

The correlation is there.
I was surprised by the assumptions in the initial answer. New Zealand and Australia are among the world’s wealthiest countries, and although Chile, Argentina, and South Africa are not, they are very prosperous for their respective continents. India may be “up-and-coming,” but most of its people are still desperately poor. Further, exceptions (the most striking is Singapore) do not disprove correlation.

I won’t answer the original question other than to say that:
  • If I saw a six-month Swedish winter coming around the corner, I’d probably be pretty quick to get my act together and start laying in supplies
  • Since just staying warm enough to survive the winter in these climates costs more than the per capita income in some of the world’s poorer equatorial countries, I’d expect the correlation to exist almost by definition

But I will illustrate mechanically that the correlation is there, and hope that someone can build on this and try to explain why.

Here’s what I did:
  • Defined “prosperity” as GDP per capita, per the latest World Bank estimates. Not perfect, but as good a metric as any. (The conclusions still hold with PPP numbers).
  • For each country, calculated a “weighted average distance from the equator” that reflects where the “average person” lives, using gridded population data from http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/gpw/global.jsp. For example, in Australia most of the population lives on the southern coast, so using the weighted average population will result in a more southern latitude than using the geographic midpoint of the country. This is an imperfect approximation, and a better analysis might look at the prosperity and location of individual population centers, but I’m not sure if this data exists or where to find it.
  • Looked at the numbers and put together some pictures.

Overall, the correlation is striking
  • 79% of the world’s population lives in countries closer to the equator than Japan, but only 31% of the world’s GDP is located there. In other words, the world’s most polar 21% of the population produces 69% of the world’s GDP.
  • In the chart below, cumulative GDP and population are displayed by distance to the equator (don’t look at the green line yet). Following the blue and grey lines from left to right, we start with equatorial countries and gradually move north and south. The line representing population is slightly “bowed out,” meaning that the world’s population is relatively concentrated around the equator. But the line representing GDP is significantly “bowed in,” reflecting the concentration of prosperity far from the equator.


  • Now take a look at the green line. This represents the gap between cumulative GDP and population at a given latitude, and is best read from right to left. It starts by including Scandanavia. These countries don’t have many people, but they do have a fair amount of GDP, so the green line edges up. As the line continues to incorporate wealthy countries in Western Europe, it keeps edging up. The huge spike occurs when the line adds the United States, and the high point is reached after it adds Japan. Then it starts to include countries closer to the equator. Since these countries tend to be populous and relatively poor, the gap between cumulative GDP and population starts to collapse, and the line heads back down.
  • If there were no correlation between prosperity and distance from the equator, we would expect the green line to be centered at zero with random oscillations due to noise in the data. Clearly this is not the case.
  • Additionally, there are aren’t any big exceptions. Reading from right to left, the green line is almost uniformly upward sloping as we add polar countries until reaching Japan, and almost uniformly downward sloping for more equatorial countries. This means that almost every country as far from the equator as Japan is near or above the world average GDP per capita, and almost every country closer to the equator than Japan is near or below the world average.

But isn’t Europe having, like, issues?
  • It’s worth noting that the answer is very different if equating prosperity with GDP growth.
  • In the chart below, the weighted GDP growth reflects where the world’s engines of absolute growth. The US economy is so large that even though it is growing at only a moderate rate, is still accounts for a big chunk of world GDP growth. Same goes for Europe, despite even lower growth rates.
  • The unweighted GDP line says, “ok, let’s pretend each country were starting from the same GDP but still growing at its present rate – if this were the case, where would the world’s growth be coming from?” In this scenario, the line is “bowed out” because equatorial countries are growing much more quickly – partly due to population growth, but also in per capita terms.



The correlation exists both across continents…
  • Western Europe and North America are two of the world’s three most polar regions, and its two most prosperous. (Per the original question, it may be worth noting that due to the gulf stream, much of the Colonial US was “effectively” as far north as Europe in terms of harsh winters.) Eastern Europe is the world’s other polar region, and is close to the world average GDP per capita.
  • Africa, Southeast Asia, and parts of Central and South America are the world’s equatorial regions, and Africa and Southeast Asia have the lowest GDP per capita. Central/South America fares better, but apart from Brazil and Venezuela, its more equatorial countries are also below the world average.

…And within individual continents. Polar latitude is…
  • A good predictor of prosperity in Western Europe, Africa and North America (counting the Caribbean states). It’s particularly striking in Western Europe, and in Africa for its prediction of relative prosperity in both the Maghreb and South Africa.
  • A reasonable predictor in South/Central Asia and Central/South America, with the exception of Venezuela.
  • A good predictor of prosperity in East Asia, with the notable exceptions of Singapore and North Korea.
  • A useless predictor in the Middle East, where oil wealth is a major factor, and Eastern Europe, for which I have no explanation.

  • There is no region in which the reverse is true, i.e., in which more equatorial countries are more prosperous than countries further from the equator.
  • While I say “good predictor,” I won’t include any correlation statistics, mostly because I have no idea how to weight the countries. Obviously China should be weighted more heavily than South Korea, but how much more is a question I won’t attempt to answer.
  • Instead, I will include a series of pictures that illustrate the correlation. The size of the bubbles is proportional to a country’s population. The x-axis is degrees from the equator and the y-axis is Per capita GDP. Countries with populations below 1,000,000 are not shown.

Why is there such a strong correlation between geographic distance from the equator and prosperity?

What if Wes Anderson directed X-Men? from Patrick Willems on Vimeo.

Watch the behind-the-scenes video here: youtube.com/watch?v=v1TamCl-k1c

James Zebooker as Iceman
Scott Thomas as Cyclops
Chloe Holgate as Jean Grey
Matt Torpey as Beast
Jacob Torpey as Angel
Zac MacKrell as Wolverine
Nate Miller as Magneto
Kendra Pettis as Storm
Chad Ruhle as the voice of Professor X

Model designer/maker - Benjamin MacKrell benjamin-mackrell.tumblr.com/
Costume designer - Kendra Pettis
Wardrobe consultant - Mary Willems

TWITTER: twitter.com/patrickhwillems
FACEBOOK: facebook.com/patrickhwillems
TUMBLR: patrickhwillems.tumblr.com/
INSTAGRAM: instagram.com/patrickhwillems

mlp-merch: “ We are happy to announce that we are able to hold our first giveaway sponsored by Littles Toy Company! We are going to give away a complete set of the Winter Gear Aurora plushies, for free! One lucky person will receive these 3 adorable...
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mlp-merch:

We are happy to announce that we are able to hold our first giveaway sponsored by Littles Toy Company! We are going to give away a complete set of the Winter Gear Aurora plushies, for free! One lucky person will receive these 3 adorable plushies. They are really soft and cuddly and ready for the cold winter.

Follow us and reblog this post to join the giveaway!

See our blog post for more info: http://www.mlpmerch.com/2014/11/mlpmerch-christmas-giveaway-3-aurora.html

The winner will be announced on the 24th of December 2014.
We’ll ship the plushies to any country!

Yay!

Source: mlpmerch.com

Poliamor from Zé Agripino on Vimeo.

(Documentário, HD, Brasil, 15 min, 2010)

Direção: José Agripino.
facebook.com/zeagripino2
Twitter
twitter.com/zeagripino

Sinopse:
Numa sociedade onde predominam valores afetivos monogâmicos, algumas pessoas escolhem um arranjo de relacionamentos que está se tornando conhecido como Poliamor.

Festivais
Prêmio André Carneiro de curta-metragem. Curta Atibaia 2010.
Melhor Roteiro Festival Close de cinema da diversidade sexual 2011.
Selecionado em 25 festivais de cinema no Brasil.

No facebook estou disponível para trocar ideias e dialogar com quem quiser dizer alguma coisa! Também compartilho outros trabalhos, referências e inspirações.

Contato:
zeagripino@gmail.com

Soderbergh's black-and-white Raiders Of The Lost Ark

parislemon:

Rob Dean:

Over on his excellent website, Extension 765, Soderbergh has uploaded a black-and-white version of the 1981 blockbuster in an effort to prompt cinephiliacs to think about how an impressive talent like Spielberg was able to convey so much of the story merely through length and composition of shots. He also removed all sound from the video, instead replacing it with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ score for The Social Network, so that viewers can solely focus on the staging of the film.

So this is what “retirement“ is like for Soderbergh. (The end result, which you can watch on Soderbergh’s site is beautiful and sort of mesmerizing.)

(via parislemon)