So, as I mentioned here before, my life has gone down the drain 
. I'm physically and mentally sick 
. This has lead me to conversations with people who are suffering like me.
Recently talked with a guy who is slowly going blind (Keratoconus) looking for a painless way to go out. He had apparently tried to approach VAD (voluntary assissted suicide) clinics in Switzerland 
but realised he was not eligible (young and no life threatening illness). Like this one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dignitas_(non-profit_organisation)
Dignitas is a Swiss non-profit organization providing physician-assisted suicide to members with terminal illness or severe physical or mental illness, supported by independent Swiss doctors. By the end of 2020, they had assisted 3,248 people with suicide at home within Switzerland and at Dignitas' house/flat near Zürich.[1] They provide advisory work on palliative care, health care advance directives, suicide attempt prevention, and legislation for right-to-die laws around the world.
Interesting stuff 
.
So now, he's looking into south american countries like mexico and colombia because one can get pentobarbital (drug used in assisted suicides) at pet shops there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_tourism
A drug known as liquid pentobarbital, which is used by owners to euthanize pets, can give a person a painless death in under one hour. Due to the drug's availability at pet shops, tourists seeking to end their lives were reported to be flying from around the world to Mexico.
He says he has some money saved up and will travel in 2 months or so 
. Honestly, I didn't even a say lot to encourage him to live which says a lot about how far I've sunk psychologically. I sympathised with him and mustered up some words about how I hoped he can get some treatment 
that fix his issue but that's about it 
.
I also joined a telegram group comprised mostly of socialist guys from slavic countries and a few from the middle east and latin american countries 
. Nothing particularly interesting there. Just thought I share 
.
So, how have you guys been?
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Is he on cornea recipient list?
TBH I've always been on right to die side of debate, it should be last resort but still.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
I didn't ask him this. He told me there's no cure. Googling about this implies this treatment is temporary. He told me he's already blind in one eye.
Why do we borrow the worst stuff from the west?
Honestly, I've never thought deeply about this but recent times have made me realise keeping people locked-in in a poor country like ours is cruel.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
How bad are things in India? I mostly know thorough accounts of foreigners who visited it (they weren't positive) but I wonder if Indians like you and
@Sasanka_of_Gauda have a different perspective
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
I wouldn't want to be poor here man. There's just no hope it's like a deep well with no ladders. The light is all the more frustrating cause you'll never reach it.
Well my father climbed out but he's built different.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Has there been some social mobility the past 30 years? 3 of my grandparents came from rural poverty. Even though my grandmother was a whiteoid from a "developed" state (RS) she grew up on a precarious wooden house with no electricity nor plumbing, and she had no shoes. Once every so many years it would snow on her town, she told me her feet almost got frozen walking to the school.
The Northeast of Brazil was probably akin to India, up until the 1990s malnutrition was a huge problem there. Most of the Latin American middle-class if fairly new.
I used to find it funny on American movies when they showed ghetto neighborhoods, and they were basically nicely built apartment blocks, but covered in graffiti, dirty and poorly kept (but weirdly enough much more violent than most large metro areas here).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Yeah, most of the middle class is new but it's still very tiny and you have to be pretty much top 1% academically to use it to climb socio economically, like my father.
That's surprising, I thought Americas except for bolivia and a few exceptions like that had moderate prosperity by early 20th century. Hopefuel I guess.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Sounds like 1970s Brazil, but with much more competition on universities as your population is larger. They do tons of filtering don't they?
Rural poverty was awful up to recent decades, but urban poverty was different.
My maternal grandmother was rural but my paternal grandmother came from an urban blue collar background, and her childhood was probably similar to that of working class people in Europe of the time. They rented a small place but it had running water and electricity, they couldn't afford a car but she took the trolley to go to school. When she was a teenager her parents managed to buy a house.
Honestly, the only South American countries with large middle classes by the 1950s were Argentina and Uruguay. All the rest were poor. There were cities in Brazil with a high development but the country as a whole was very rural back in the day.
Bolivia is just one of the latest to catch up, but I find Chile's story more impressive as they managed to surpass Argentina by far.
So yeah, there's hope, but there's also the "middle-income-trap" which LATAM seems to be getting stuck, never becoming fully developed. Still better than what we had 60 years ago.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Yeah, one of the reasons for my misery is that I have a career gap is so large that it has essentially locked me out of several fields that are major job creators in India.
Sasanka is right about the light at the end of the tunnel being so painful because it is so out of reach for most of us. There's a reason why some Indians spend tens of thousands of dollars and risk their lives to become refugees in the west.
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/tracing-the-donkey-route-how-thousands-of-indians-risk-lives-each-year-in-pursuit-of-american-dream/articleshow/106300713.cms
And these are people from some of the more better off states in India. So you get the idea of the situation here.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context