What’s common between Oprah Winfrey, Harry Houdini, Jim Carey, and Daniel Craig? All of them have had extremely humble beginnings and have lived through various levels of poverty before achieving the glories that they have achieved.
Oprah Winfrey, admired for her enormous talents and someone who continues to be an inspiration for the current generation, has a perfect rags-to-riches story of our era. She was in abject poverty during her childhood and she has used her talents to overcome her circumstances and become the richest female in the world. Halle Berry used to stay in a homeless shelter, Jim Carey used to sleep in VW can during his early days with his family, Daniel Craig (James Bond) is also known to have slept on park benches in London, Harry Houdini considered the greatest magician ever used to beg for coins on the streets before turning into a magician.
Steve Jobs in his famous Stamford speech said that he during his college days slept in his friend’s rooms, returned coke bottles to buy food with and walk seven miles every Sunday night to get a good meal at the Hare Krishna Temple. What is really interesting here that he mentioned that all this helped him learn many things which turned out to be priceless later on.
While we always like to hear the stories of those who succeed and there are only a handful of people who have made it. There are probably many more of the estimated 1.4 billion people living below the poverty line. In India 32.67% of the population live below the poverty line. India still ranks 36 below in the list of countries with high poverty rates.
It is perhaps difficult to emotionally connect and empathize with those who live in poverty unless one experiences it. One concept which is building awareness as well as creates the experience (at least partly) is “Live Below The Line”. This is a campaign which challenges participants to feed themselves on the equivalent of the extreme poverty line for five days. The line is defined as US $ 1.25 per day which is defined by the World Bank as the extreme poverty line.
For India these figures seem to be high as about a quarter of Indian population is estimated to be living at $0.40 a day. Through this campaign the participant raises money that is used towards poverty alleviation. The live below the line schemes challenges people to try and keep the expenditure on food alone below the poverty mark. The very thought of living with 15-20 Rs a day for the next 5 days seems daunting. If we had just Rs 15 a day what do we eat?
Oprah Winfrey, admired for her enormous talents and someone who continues to be an inspiration for the current generation, has a perfect rags-to-riches story of our era. She was in abject poverty during her childhood and she has used her talents to overcome her circumstances and become the richest female in the world. Halle Berry used to stay in a homeless shelter, Jim Carey used to sleep in VW can during his early days with his family, Daniel Craig (James Bond) is also known to have slept on park benches in London, Harry Houdini considered the greatest magician ever used to beg for coins on the streets before turning into a magician.
While we always like to hear the stories of those who succeed and there are only a handful of people who have made it. There are probably many more of the estimated 1.4 billion people living below the poverty line. In India 32.67% of the population live below the poverty line. India still ranks 36 below in the list of countries with high poverty rates.
It is perhaps difficult to emotionally connect and empathize with those who live in poverty unless one experiences it. One concept which is building awareness as well as creates the experience (at least partly) is “Live Below The Line”. This is a campaign which challenges participants to feed themselves on the equivalent of the extreme poverty line for five days. The line is defined as US $ 1.25 per day which is defined by the World Bank as the extreme poverty line.
For India these figures seem to be high as about a quarter of Indian population is estimated to be living at $0.40 a day. Through this campaign the participant raises money that is used towards poverty alleviation. The live below the line schemes challenges people to try and keep the expenditure on food alone below the poverty mark. The very thought of living with 15-20 Rs a day for the next 5 days seems daunting. If we had just Rs 15 a day what do we eat?
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