Poverty In My Life

“Once a person is determined to help themselves, there is nothing that can stop them” (By Nelson Mandela)

Even after India got independence, there were a lot of problems like poverty, child labour, illiteracy etc. My grandfather, Jayantilal Shah was born in a joint family in a village called Dhanera, which is located in North-West India’s state called Gujarat. He came to Mumbai at the age 10-15 years old, in order to earn some money, as his family was really poor. He started a business with jaggery (a coarse dark brown sugar made in India by evaporation of the sap of palm trees) in large scale. My father, Kiran Shah was the 4th and youngest child of my grandfather. My father says, “During this time in India, we were living in a middle class style. There was a lot of poverty in India, but we were luckily living a pretty good life. Though we didn’t have any luxurious things, we were living a life better than my father did. My father had many branches, and my father would buy and sell jaggery in large scale. There were 89% of people who were living in poverty when my father was born, which was in the 1970s. In 1980, my grandfather died of lung cancer. After his death, my father’s family fell into almost extreme poverty. My father says, “We don’t how we did it, but we survived somehow by supporting each other somehow,” It was during the 1980s when India’s economical state started to improve but for my father’s family, the situation went in the other direction; the opposite