We can end hunger and starvation together by our unbridled acts of kindness, Says PARIS KESWANI

WHY THE WORLD MUST CARE NOW

“Poverty Our Collective Shame in the Age of Abundance”

By PARIS KESWANI, Ambassador of Goodwill, Humanitarian Emeritus 

Each time I peruse the pages of such esteemed online finance publications as 

BLOOMBERG, FORBES, LONDON FINANCIAL TIMES AND WALL 

STREET JOURNAL, I always run into a magnanimous outline of how many 

billionaires were added to the runaway computational matrix used to keep the data 

by these organizations. However, I hardly see the data on the number of newly 

made homeless, hapless, impoverished BY INHUMANE POLICIES and laws in 

the localities where the said billionaires were counted. 

As a humble student of history and one with a natural love for origin of words and 

other such phenomena that may remain inexplicable if we didn’t forage through 

those dark tunnels of the past ages, I decided to look up the origin of the word 

poor. From the Webster’s English Dictionary poor (adj.) c. 1200, "lacking money 

or resources, destitute of wealth; needy, indigent;" also "small, scanty," also 

voluntarily and deliberately, "devoid of possessions in conformity with Christian 

virtues," from Old French povre "poor, wretched, dispossessed; inadequate; weak, 

thin" (Modern French pauvre), from Latin pauper "poor, not wealthy," from pre-

Latin *pau-paros "producing little; getting little," a compound from the roots 

of paucus "little" (from PIE root *pau- (1) "few, little") and parare "to produce, 

bring forth" (from PIE root *pere- (1) "to produce, procure"). 

As can be gleaned from the preceding excerpts, the word poor is simply synthetic 

and introduced at a time when the world had immersed itself into multitudes of

resolvable conflicts and in so doing created an unfortunate population of war victims made destitute by our refusal to yield and find common grounds for 

conflict resolution. Should our stubbornness and refusal to compromise become 

the downfall of our natural sense of generosity? The most common undeniable 

factor found in every race, gender, creed, and class is our unhinged access to 

oxygen which we must breathe in to stay alive. I kindly and humbly remind us all

that for each iota of breath you take, there are millions of nostrils receiving the 

same ounce of air but in empty stomachs. 

With all the trillions of dollars created through the ingenuity of people and the 

commands of national governments, we should appeal to our innate spirit of 

generosity and share the excess we have accumulated with those of us who do not 

have. I kindly leave you with this anecdote of a very wealthy Man, whose name 

we respectfully conceal, who held an exclusive interview with a famous journalist. 

The wealthy Man spent many hours talking about his possessions and especially 

his 1100 room mansion which he was obviously proud of. At the end of the 

interview the journalist summoned up courage and asked the wealthy Man in how 

many rooms he was going to sleep that night, bearing in mind that he had 1100 

rooms in his mansion. The wealthy Man realizing the almost biblical folly found 

in the opulent display of his acquisitions became very angry and banned the 

journalist from ever interviewing him again.

Rather than get angry at the truth, we should summon the courage of kindness, do 

charitable works and strive to become a cheerful global humanitarian. We can end 

hunger and starvation together by our unbridled acts of kindness.