Why poverty is worse today than it was in olden days

I am glad that Homebound's shortlisting for an Oscar nomination gives me an opportunity to say something tangential.

- MANU JOSEPH

Modern poverty, even if it comes with a smartphone, is worse than ancient poverty.

The film, directed by Neeraj Ghaywan, and written by him with Shreedhar Dubey and Varun Grover, shows two young men trying to escape poverty through the processes that India tells its young will save them. They decide to apply for a police job; they see great hordes who want the same thing. Still, it is a path, and the two friends feel that if they follow the process, there would be a reward at the end of it. So they endure it all and complete the application. Then they wait. Nothing happens.

Their lives are so delicate that just about any small mishap can ruin them.

As you watch the film, you wonder if there was any other way they could have been that would have made their lives safer and happier. Maybe if they chose not to have an ambition or to love or have a family, would they be happier? Is that even possible? What is this trap they are born into? How can poverty be so suffocating and miserable when for most of human existence we have lived in it?

Until recently, most people were poor. The history of the middle class is probably one of our shortest histories. The stories from the childhood of our parents would reveal a society that was poor or very close to it. In poverty is the heritage of us all.