NEW DELHI: Just outside Delhi, where the city ebbs away into the countryside, India was last week presented with a gruesome example of its depressing and seemingly infinite varieties of poverty. Ajay Yadav, the three-year-old son of a labourer, wandered away from his family to feed a herd of pigs, offering them a torn piece of his lunchtime chapatti. Poor villagers often live cheek by jowl with their animals. Ajay's parents did not notice him step out -- or the bloody frenzy that ensued. Moments later all that was left of the boy was half-eaten limbs. Reports say the pigs sank their teeth into his neck before tearing him apart.

Although the headline "Pig eats boy" proved irresistible for newspaper editors the next day, it was quickly subsumed by India's self-image: that of a superpower in waiting. Little time was spent on Ajay's dismal fate. There was more to read about the arrival of Volkswagen hatchbacks in India and about Wal-Mart's plans for dozens of hypermarkets dotted across the country.

It's not just the editorial choices that gloss over the social realities. Adverts show glamorous couples living in outsized Spanish-style villas stuffed with household appliances, unaffordable to the masses. To the naked eye, however, India appears not just an underdeveloped society but an extremely unjust one. There are 260 million poor in the country, and more than 1,000 children die of diarrhoea every day.

The official poverty numbers are going down -- but not fast enough for anyone to notice. The roads of India's capital are lined with ragged children and beggars waving handless stumps. Yet the flow of uninterrupted good news continues. Living in India sometimes feels like being in a cult, with hundreds of millions of souls convinced of the country's inevitable rise into global, nuclear-armed power. Breaking the spell are the awful realities that surface in the nation's consciousness: Miss Universe pukes during a goodwill visit to a Delhi slum, an untouchable is chopped into pieces for transgressing the social order and pigs eat a little boy for lunch. —Dawn News Service Guardian