One of the best movies of 2016 is at the Fleur cinema right now, the Lion. Saroo, a 5 year old boy in 1986 India gets separated from his impoverished family. He ends up 800 miles away on the other side of India near Calcutta. Mispronouncing his own name and slurring together the name of his town and the neighboring town, the few attempts to unite him and his family come to naught.

Months pass and it is now 1987. Saroo escapes the hell hole of an Indian orphanage when a kind Australian couple adopts him. He thrives in the loving and nurturing home of the Brierley’s. He graduates college but is triggered by various events to long for his biological family that he is unable to suppress.  Google Earth is the new technology in 2006 that launches him into the search for his Indian family.

If ever a country exemplified “chaos theory”, it is India. Whether it is the delivery of lunch boxes in Mumbai or the randomness of life and death in Calcutta, Saroo’s survival on the subcontinent could be classified as a miracle or chance. Sue Brierley, Saroo’s adoptive mother looks at it as divine providence for the vision she had as a 12 year old to someday have a brown child.

Looking at the stark differences between the development of India and Australia, you realize the dysfunction of India is by design. The thought that came to my mind in the opening moments of the film, watching India’s teeming hordes of people, is that they are a commodity to the government and corporate leaders of India. No different than any non-living commodity. The difference being that the people of India are subject to unimaginable amounts of misery and suffering.

Indians are as hardworking as anyone else. Indians are as smart as anyone else. Yet for a large part of the people, India is a backwards hellhole. In some ways India didn’t progress until the English came, and that progress stopped when the English left. Australia progressed once the English came, and that progress never stopped. The government of Australia is not trying to hold it’s people down.

Normally a nation is like the 5 year old in the movie. It grows, gets stronger, smarter and more adept. It does not stay as helpless and pathetic for it’s entire life. Africa and India never progressed, except for the elites. It would almost seem harder to make time stand still then it would be to allow natural progression. But for some reason, many parts of the world do not wish their people to have opportunity.

Benevolent neglect would serve the people of India better than the oppression they are subjected to now. They would at least then stand a chance.

“India has the highest number of people below the international poverty line of $1.25 a day. India has the highest number of people living in conditions of slavery, 18 million, most of whom are in bonded labor. India has the largest number of child laborers under the age of 14 in the world with an estimated 12.6 million children engaged in hazardous occupations”. When humans are used and abused as a money making commodity, a stench seems to cover the land.