Living on $6 a day means you have a refrigerator, a TV, a cell phone, your children can go to school. That's not possible on $1 a day.
In all honesty, my favorite place to write is an anonymous, cheap hotel in a city or town where nobody knows me, the wireless service is spotty, and the adjoining gas station has coffee, beer and junk food.
I saw my first indoor bathroom when I was 9.
It means food on every table, every child in school, a job for everybody and a house with toilet and electricity for every family. This will make India proud. We can achieve this through unity. Unity strengthens us. Division weakens us.
All that proves is that most of the world is too poor to build bowling alleys, golf courses, tennis courts and baseball fields. There's hundreds of millions of poor people out there who still ain't got indoor plumbing, but that don't mean there's something great about an outhouse. Soccer is boring. I've never seen a more boring sport.
I was brought up in a tenement house in a working district. We didn't even have a bathroom! We had a gaslight in the hallway and a black-and-white TV.
In India, more people have cell phones than access to a toilet
Good roads, good houses, adequate electricity, good schools or good hospitals in the village are indeed, the parameters of progress. However, in my view, 100 percent literate village is the true symbol of real progress.
Clean water and health care and school and food and tin roofs and cement floor, all of these things should constitute a set of basics that people must have as birthrights.
I have stayed in homes that didn't have basic infrastructure such as proper washrooms.
I'm happy to report you still get nothing you don't need at Motel 6, and, therefore, you don't have to pay for it. I don't need valet parking. If I can drive the old crate 300 miles to the hotel all by myself, I can certainly handle the last nine feet to the parking space.
People who can turn on a tap and have safe and clean water to drink, to cook with and to bathe in often take it for granted — and yet more than one billion of our fellow human beings have little choice but to use potentially harmful sources of water
