Re: Disease as Development: Marketing HIV/AIDS for NGO Profit

[Guest guest]

Dear Forum Members:

Thank you Manish for passing on that article; these noises are being heard of

late, and of course they should. There are some important nuggets of truth in

the article..

What I liked about the article however was how the writer had inadvertently

picked up on the irony of the entire AIDS blitz almost without realizing it,

instead taking up cudgels on behalf of four million suffering AIDS victims,

himself possibly having no connection or idea about them...!

Big business, the market, a financial bottomline, controls everything we do,

from the air we inhale, to how we die. Its inescapable, its like the internet,

it connects us all, and we all make it survive and thrive.

And in a world like this some of us more than others can watch the parody, and

laugh, and know we have to be part of it, and yet strive to carve out a life

less banal.

With the market, the financial transaction, 'the best deal', being the metaphor

for just about anything we do or feel or experience, its unlikely that AIDS is

going to be left out of the scenario...Any sense of outrage, passion,

imagination, revolution, has to be sanitized and modified to toe a mandate, to

fit an agenda..

But many of us need to believe in a good/bad/black/white positioning of the

universe through concepts of NGOs as pristine havens of goodness, 'doing good

work (read good as intelligent, morally above board, diligent, not slipshod, not

cutting corners, all that is fair and just...)' for all of suffering humanity

'out there'.... .These ideas make us feel that vicarious salvation is indeed

available, through the good deeds and intentions of others/institutions.

And so we pout when NGOs or the people in them want a piece of the AIDS pie, we

want to hold on to notions of 'charity', altruism, and self- effacement, which

we think should characterise development/NGOs...Why do we place irrational

expecations of growth, 'goodness', actualization, or morality on NGOs and those

who work in them when we do not enforce the same standards on other

institutions? What gene or what bit of schooling makes NGO folk more capable of

achieving these expectations?

Its a personal view that the AIDS carousel powers, and is powered by a clever

symbiosis between the haves and the never-will-haves (and the ubiquitous middle

man). You rub my conscience, and I'll let you drive my Jaguar!

But rather than lose myself in all this pontificating, I think its far more

useful for individuals to employ a ruthless process of analysis towards

understanding whats going wrong, and use this knowledge at a personal,

organizational, and local level to change how we do things....(and thats only if

thats why we we think we are here...to change the individual self, or merely

massage the system?)

Recognize that the politician, the global bazaar, the NGO/institution, the

glitterati are going to get mileage out of all this anyway as they always do,

and the individual who actually works in this sector has an element of choice

about which circus he/she wants to be part of...opt out of one only to be landed

in another...We all work within a very small narrow corridor of possibility, and

its remarkable that so much has already been achieved in this country.

These social-political forces are embedded in the system, and the work on AIDS

prevention is as much about AIDS as it is about the imbalances or power and

opportunity that rule all our lives.

In my view the challenge really is to raise the level of the discourse, the

analysis, (as the TOI article no doubt intended to do), and use these tools to

make our work more creative in design, more imaginative in finding solutions.

If that is not an individual goal, then there really is no point expecting any

returns on your investment..

Regards,

Maya Ganesh

E-mail: mayaganesh02@...