These two people from the other end of the world have tricked me into it many times, with their 2 Ps ( yeah, I remember the 4 Ps of marketing )..the Pen and the Photo ( ok ok..that one was a bad one ). And most of it has ended up in disasters. Like this one HERE.

But one of the times, I have managed to salvage the situation which itself is cause to celebrate ( well, more so , since its the 50th post on this blog…I didn’t realise it, just that WordPress has a better design now which announces the number of posts )…Presenting Puran Poli, irresistably inspired by Bee’s Beautiful Puran Polis .

I’ve not done any much tweaking to the recipe that Bee has given, just a bit of disaster management whenever required …. here is a 3 stage photograph of one of the least mutilated puran poli from the batch :-)

 It has been a long time since I sent any entries to any Events…Am sending over this one to the Roti Mela hosted by Srivalli at Cooking 4 all Seasons

We are going in the right direction, and will continue to do well, even if it means that people worldover ( including ours ) go without food. We don’t need to bother about the food crisis as of yet. We can still blame Bush and the corn getting diverted towards biofuels. It doesn’t matter if the farmers commit suicide. We have waived off their debts and now we don’t need to worry till after the elections. It doesn’t matter if inflation is also touching the 8 % mark, aren’t we still going to grow at 8% ?

Since not being an economist, I have the luxury of looking at issues at its face value and not reduce it to theories of supply & demand (Bottomline…I can still ramble, without sounding stupid, whereas if you are an economist, you don’t have that luxury, I guess ! I must admit though, I respect economists who can wade through theories and still have some semblance of sense around them ! ).

While looking at the latest Human Development Index data for India, I read this :

The Estimated Earned Income for a female in India ( at PPP, US $ )  is 1620 $.

We are at rank 125 out of 169 countries, in this parameter. ( excluding some of the countries for which there is no information provided).

Norway is at the top of the list, with a woman’s annual estimated income at 30,749 $. There are 44 countries with incomes above 10,000 $.

We are worse off than most of the countries which we know of, and would consider when we talk of economic development.

According to India’s last census report, we have 127 million female workers, out of a total of 402 million workers. That makes it 31% of the total worker population. It also converts to 26% of the total women population in India. As against the 52% male workers as against the total male population.

The ratio of Estimated female to male earned income for India is 0.31 ( Norway is 0.77, Kenya is 0.83 ) . We have only 13 countries below us.

There may be technicalities involved, because of which this may not be the correct parameter to measure women’s status in society or their improving economic liberation. But still, the very poor performance of our country in terms of the economic progress of women does merit a pause and some thought.

P.S. To all Indians, Bush feels that we are all eating too much of Rice ( the edible variety ) and thats why there is a food crisis in the world. So all Indians are now supposed to go “fasting” towards better distribution of the Edible Rice and yes, our politicians think that it is a compliment to the way they have “well -fed” the masses