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13: Boom for mkts, doom for poor
Published on Tue, Oct 31, 2006 at 07:53, Updated on Tue, Oct 31, 2006 at 12:23 in 
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Patna: It’s a shocking tale of two Indias, the irony of which is clearly indicative of the stark socio-economic disparity.
While the country’s business entrepreneurs raised a toast to BSE benchmark Sensex breaching the 13,000 mark on Monday, thousands of miles away in Bihar, a man committed suicide after not having eaten for 13 days.
While stock markets' upward journey from 11K to 13K was marked with nationwide jubilation, this man's agony of starvation for 13 days was lost in anonymity.
Found hanging from the roof of a local passenger train in Patna, all proof that the man left behind of his identity was a suicide note that read: “I don't belong to this world. I am helpless.”
“His body was found tied to a small rack near the berth. He was in a standing position and had apparently hung himself,” says DIG, Railways, Ajay Verma.
In his suicide note, the man - yet to be identified - hasn’t blamed anyone.
All he has repeatedly insisted is that it was his poverty that drove him to starvation, which made him helpless enough to put an end to his life.
“The suicide note says he had not eaten for last 12 days and was only surviving on water. He has also written that no one really cared for him or asked him where he had come from. We’ll get to know more about his death after the post-mortem,” says Verma.
Having lost his battle with hunger after putting up a brave front almost 15 days, this man is perhaps India’s most touching face of hunger and poverty.
But will his thought-provoking suicide note be of any relevance for the powers that be, or will his desperation be lost in the loud celebrations of an India galloping towards the goal of a global superpower?
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