In 2010 I moved from Tokyo to Mumbai, where I then lived for nearly three years. Mumbai is an overwhelming city, just as India is an overwhelming country, with great wealth and great poverty.
A good Mumbai bookshop had a selection of photobooks about India, and I noted down the titles: "The Sacred India", "Monumental India", "India - Splendour and Colour", "Mumbai - Where Dreams Don't Die", "Mumbai Footpaths: Paths of Courage, Journeys of Hope", "India: Land of Celebration".
In a country in which the average income is less than five dollars per day (source: World Bank) it troubled me greatly that the perspective seemed to be so one-sided. People characterized as being "colourful", "hopeful", "celebratory" would never be able to afford the photobooks which described their poverty in such picturesque terms.
Many of Mumbai's problems seemed obvious to me. However the scale of those problems was such that I could see no solution.
In the autumn of 2014 I visited some refugee camps for Burmese ethnic minorities in Thailand. Such camps along the Thai-Myanmar border house in excess of 100,000 people, in an area with a significant military presence. That too is not a small problem.
However the organization that I travelled with, Refugees International Japan, introduced me to various projects which convinced me that positive change is possible in the face of major humanitarian difficulties.
This brought me no closer to being able to suggest a solution for widespread poverty and its consequences in India and elsewhere; but it persuaded me too that optimism is not redundant, and reminded me that the cumulative effect of many small acts of assistance can be truly significant.
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