Unveiling India 1st Edition

Population deals with the most delicate of human relationships the act of love, the family and the mystery the surroundsit...how do you tell people how many children to have and not invade people's privacy or upset their values? The populationalso means increasing the value of each birth; it means guaranteeing that our children are given the fullest opportunity tobe educated, to get good health care, to have access to the jobs that they eventually want. I think population anddevelopment go hand in hand.These two key aspects of the thinking of Rafael Salas of the United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA)started me on the search and journey which eventually resulted in this book. But, initially, when the UNFPA asked me toexplore the nature of the population problem in India, I was, to put it mildly, staggered. How does one tell the story of a
Salas writes, one man is a person, a thousand are a community, and a million are a statistic. I decided finally to writesomething that wouldn't reinforce the statistics that make India's millions but would look instead for the faces behind thefigures. As each face becomes a person, numbers cease being an abstraction. Written by one among the numbers, it is astory that has moved outward from a core that is integral and become a statistic? As an attempt to understand a conditionthat is shared.The book could not have been written without the inspiration of Rafael Salas and the UNFPA, an organization that directswith the panache of a civil servant and the veiled stoicism of a Buddhist monk. I thank him and his staff in NewYork and New Delhi for their generous assistance that gave me the freedom to move around and write.