I may have mentioned I'm reading Paul Theroux's Ghost Train to the Eastern Star. He convicts me with some discussion of late on his travels through India:

When an Indian says, as one said to me, "There are two hundred and fifty million middle-class Indian, which is very nice, but four hundred million are living below the poverty line," how do you respond? Two hundred years ago, the French aphorist Chamfort described Paris as "a cityof amusements, pleasures, etc., in which four-fifths of the inhabitants die of want." You could say the same of any city in India. (197)

"The high standard of life we enjoy in England depends on keeping a tight hold on the Empire," Orwell wrote. "In order that England may live in comfort, a hundred million Indians must live on the edge of starvation." (197)

Finally, after witnessing Americans drawn to tears in response to Indian poverty, he writes:

I have never seen any community in India look so hopeless or, in its way, so hermetic in its poverty, so blatant in its look of menace, so sad and unwelcoming, as East St. Louis, Illinois, the decaying town that lies across the Mississippi from flourishing St. Louis, Missouri. Yet I can imagine that many people from St. Louis proper would weep at the sight of Indian poverty. They dare not cross their own river to see the complacent decrepitude and misery on the other bank. (199)
Convicting.