Where do we go from here?

On the metro ride home from visiting Kingsway Camp (SPYM’s de-addiction and rehabilitation center for adolescent boys) this past Thursday, I had a really good discussion with my supervisor. No, it wasn’t about the deep understanding of cricket or Shahrukh Khan. It was about the state of funding and HIV/AIDS in India. My kind of conversation. He said that for the past few years, funders such as UNAIDS and others have started to decrease their funding in India. He said that he wouldn’t be surprised if UNAIDS even left India within the next 5 years.

Like I thought, it was 1) because the rate of new infections have stabilized and even gone down in some areas and 2) with India being a lower middle income country now, funders want to focus their attention on countries that really need it.

So, that leaves me with some questions. Where does India go from here? How do they keep on the same path of lowering the infection rate? And on the flip side of the coin, with India’s new infection rates decreasing, where should UNAIDS and other funders put their priorities? Where will their money matter, where a country will not take it for granted and instead move up in the world?

I told him though that in my experience a middle income country is only charged with such a status because it’s the average of the country. And he said the disparity between the rich and poor is becoming more and more of a gap. He’d told me earlier in the day that there’s a mall not too far away from our office where items there start at $2,000 US….Coach purses for $5,000 US. Initially I was shocked, but after thinking about it, it makes sense. We’re in Delhi, the capital of the country. If India wants to keep growing and changing with the times, they have to bring in Westernized stores for the 1% that can afford it. I wonder what Thomas Friedman (The World is Flat book) would have to say about this.

After getting off the metro, I told him how happy I was to be able to learn more about this topic from grad school. Not only to be knowledgeable about this topic, but to be able to ask these important questions and actually have a conversation with professors that might have the answer. But I am privileged. Even though I am part of the growing population relying solely on loans to go to grad school, I am still privileged. I am privileged to be able to take out those loans, to be able to live in the US and to be able to attend an American institution. Umm, SITers, I think there’s a little bit of Ken Williams rubbing off on me. Flashbacks of Social Identity class are coming into my head!

At 7:30pm on a Thursday and after a long day, it was certainly not the kind of conversation that I’d thought I would have on the metro ride home, but then again India is constantly surprising me and keeping me on my toes. And I am grateful for it.