Dear Mr. President - Society

Dear Mr. President,

I very recently returned from a trip to a city in your country. I was in San Francisco for close to one week and had a very interesting time there. My visit perhaps was the trigger, and for the first time in the past two years that I have known of you, I wanted to write to you.

Before I venture into the purpose of this letter, I would like to say that I followed your campaign for two years and like many other non-Americans, who did not have any direct role in your election, did feel very proud that you were elected to the office of the President. Many congratulations.

I am a filmmaker and lawyer who now lives and works in Canada. I was born in India and spent a bulk of my life there. I have grown up around poverty and the process of social development (or lack thereof) that comes with it. I make special reference to poverty because my experience in San Francisco is defined by this social and economic menace. I would at the outset request that you not view this note as a judgment or critique of the city or the people of San Francisco, nor is this an attempt to tell you or your administration what is right or wrong with the city I recently visited. This is merely an attempt to share some of my observations and perceptions, which perhaps will provide you with a different view of how poverty and social apathy plays out on the streets of San Francisco.

You and I don't need to get into the politics or the history of poverty. We have been part of a world which inherited the institutions of colonization. We are now watching before us an evolution of society which is deeply rooted in capitalist norms and continues to work for the few while the majority struggles to survive. If the obvious happenings don't teach us anything, then I don't really know what else can. I ventured out into the streets of San Francisco and saw people wandering around, crying out loud, talking to themselves, directionless, inhabiting a meaningless existence. Begging was more a conditioned response, than a need based activity. Social engagement included the desperate need to take, to better ones dilapidated economic state. When on a beautiful morning I walked out of my hotel wanting to go for a run, and half a mile on the state of a neighborhood halted my step and made me want to just observe and ask why? If the poverty, extreme and deliberate sense of it, in the exorbitant plenty that surrounds the people, is not a problem that seems to be taken to task, I wonder why we are? I don't want to claim here that anything I saw on the streets, anything I witnessed happening in the city space that I inhabited for a week was different from what I have witnessed or experienced in other parts of the world. But I did felt a lack of hope, an absence of it also. I did not feel that people around me were joyous or even have the glimmer of hope in their eyes that this would change. The state of poverty and the lack of mental coherence that has existed there is now what that city, what that community of people are identified with, as.

I walked on the Golden Gate Bridge, looking into the expanse of the water that washes the city peninsula. The deception was so stark. On the one hand I was mesmerized at the enormous achievement that the construction of the bridge represented, while on the other the city that was spread in front of my eyes, the people who lived in those streets, whom I had encountered, I had spoken to, I had walked among, I just couldn't ignore them. I couldn't marvel at this landscape for it did not give me hope.

At the risk of sermonizing to you, I do think that the only measure of anything being done in and for our societies is when there is some tangible, visible progress. Even if one or half a step is taken forward in our lives, in the lives of our communities, that is progress, that is the continuation of our human evolution. But the absence of it is just disappointing.

I don't know if you will find a few minutes to read what I have written to you. I do not wish you to respond to me. I do however hope that you will "today" task someone, a group of researchers from the sprawling campuses of the universities across the US, a public policy professional, a social worker, anyone who has the skills and the commitment, and send them to the streets of San Francisco, make them begin working right now on a model, a mechanism that will begin the process of poverty eradication on the streets. That will make services available to people with mental disorders. We can't wait today, we can't wait another day for it to be done. For the problem has to be taken to task.

In the end I want to share a very difficult sentiment I had to deal with. I have never once in my life felt out of place. The richest and the poorest, the coldest and the warmest have always made me feel welcome. I have felt one with humanity throughout my journey through life. I have never been in a situation where I had to feel or say to myself, that this is not my country, this is not my world, for it is, all of the countries of the world, this humanity is my community for I inhabit this world with everyone. For the first time in my life I felt out of place, I couldn't identify with anything, I couldn't feel one with a single aspect of the life that I encountered in the city. For the first time I had to say, thank god I am not an American, thank god I don't live in this country, thank god I have a home to go back to. This emotion pained me beyond belief. I have had great experiences in your country. Americans have welcomed me wherever I have traveled, and never once have I agreed with the negativity that surrounds the image of what America is. But this time it was different. It was disappointing.

As the President of your country I hope that over the next months and years when you sign an executive order, one of them would be setting up a task force that is designed to combat the menace of hopelessness that lives on the streets of San Francisco. You represent change, however the absence of hope makes change a distant distant distant reality.

Thank you for your patience Mr. President.

best wishes to you and your country,