“Why are poor children so fat, papa? Just look at those bellies.”

Every Indian middle-class parent has dreaded this question and, I dare say, been foxed by it. The question seems so logical in the mind of a child, who with his unprejudiced eyes gathers the daily horrors that are on show, horrors that his parents have learnt to mostly ignore. But children – well, they see it all, and every time you mention smugly that India was once a sone ki chidiya it only befuddles them further, especially when they see no evidence of it.

A sun-burnt mother in a flaming red sari squats by the busy roadside and hammers fist-sized rocks into goat dropping-sized portions for the benefit of the cement mixer that will arrive sometime in the next century. The hammer rises above her head in a slow painful arc, until it can go no further, and then, equally slowly, equally painfully, it descends.

Thuckk. Silence. Thuckk…

A strike a minute, a rock an hour, a heap a day.

Her two little children – naked and protected only by the taviz that is tied round their upper arms – play a small distance away, inspecting earthworms and tasting mud. Snot that was once fluid lies frozen beneath their nostrils like day-old lava. Their eyes are huge, brought out even more so with kajal, and their hair is matted – it acts like a sponge for the cloud of dust every unruly bus shoves in their direction. Their bellies jut out far away from their bodies and the flesh of their belly button protrudes visibly, like the knotted mouth of a balloon. They can’t run or walk, they can only waddle like baby ducks.

Yes, wonders the parent, why are these kids so fat? Shouldn’t it be the other way round? He goes home and Googles. He discovers, much to his astonishment, that kids with bloated bellies aren’t fat. They are starving. He discovers the disease has a strange name: Kwashiorkor – extreme protein malnutrition and clenched-fist-biting hunger that leads to edema. Blood vessels can no longer hold fluid and it seeps and collects in the stomach.

Their bellies are full – with water, and there is no way the exhausted child can pump all that water out. The protein he was getting was mostly form his mother’s milk, but the mother’s back is broken and she hasn’t eaten properly for days or slept properly for months but still she thrusts her little boy’s hungry mouth to her breast – a mouth that attempts woefully to clasp at the nipple – but there’s nothing, not a drop in those shrivelled lumps of flesh. “There, there”, she says, “There, there,” like Rose of Sharon before her, but Mother India is empty. She has been left to wander the streets and break rocks, while her children appear fat to other children.

So it has come to this. Well, wasn’t it always so – this bloating, this unwanted distension? Hasn’t Mother India always been nothing more than a rind, her juice squeezed out by years of neglect and misery and cruelty, until all that remains is but a proud euphemism?

Admit it: bloating comes naturally to us as a nation. It not only affects our stomachs but also our minds. And a bloated mind chooses to drive past bloated stomachs. There’s always a train to catch, a meeting to attend, a lecture to give. We are nearly there, almost there, just about there.

There, there.

Where? Where are we?

You are here: Lost in the vineyards of wrath. The paths are all so narrow and winding and each vine looks the same, no landmark like a pavement tent or an inhabited water pipe. If only we had a map to guide us, to show us the way out. If only.

This is how the world looked the day Jesus Christ was born.

Map 1. World population in 1 AD. Each country is sized according to the input variable, in this case population (see Author’s note)

We were bloated then. We have remained bloated ever since.

 Map 2. World population in 2011 AD

A large population living off limited resources, made even more limited by callous politicians, has meant we have remained poor, helpless, hungry, powerless, slavish, illiterate, diseased – and bloated. Rampant corruption, environmental neglect, no jobs for the rural sector – with millions at the mercy of periodic drought, flood, and famine – has led to a near-vanishing of our most precious resource.

 Map 3. Proportion of world land area without forest cover.

The depletion of forest cover and its resulting aftermath has led millions to escape their natural habitat in search of livelihood.

 Map 4. Proportion of world population that lives in urban slums.

Uncontrolled migration to urban areas has led to dastardly living conditions.

 Map 5. Proportion of world population that lives in overcrowded homes.

Cities that are little more than overcrowded hell-holes has meant a total breakdown of public amenities like sanitation. Six hundred million Indians don’t have access to toilets.

 Map 6. Proportion of world population living without proper sanitation.

Filthy rivers, defunct municipalities, improper segregation of sewage and water pipelines have led to an acute drinking water scarcity.

 Map 7. Proportion of world population consuming water unfit for drinking.

With all these changes has come crippling, mind-numbing poverty. Eight hundred and thirty million of us live on Rs 20 a day.

 Map 8. Proportion of world population living in poverty.

Poverty has led to child labour, which is illegal in India, just like bribe-taking is.

 Map 9. Proportion of world population practising child labour.

When man has so little to live on, when his crops fail year after year and there is nothing to eat, when mounting debt knocks at his door every night and forces him to evade the blank stares from his starving children – what goes on in that mind of his? Just one thing: that debt cannot be inherited.

 Map 10. Proportion of world population succumbing to suicide.

And what of the millions who survive all this mayhem? Is life no more a struggle for them? Can they look forward to a rosy future – education for their kids, food on the table, no diseases to die from?

 Map 11. Proportion of girls not at primary school.

 Map 12. Proportion of female illiteracy.

What happens when a young girl is forced into child labour and not sent to school?

 Map 13. Proportion of childhood pregnancies.

But that is just the start of her problems.

 Map 14. Proportion of pregnancy-related female mortality.

And then, like magic, a child is born to an Indian mother. In medieval times, they used to say the first few weeks are crucial. Well, they say it still.

 Map 15. Proportion of early neonatal mortality (within first week of life).

The Indian child has squeezed through even this loop. And now he breathes a sigh of relief, unaware of what lies ahead: great rings of fire.

Map 16. Proportion of infant mortality (within first year of life).

Map 17. Proportion of population suffering from childhood diarrhoea.

Map 18. Proportion of malnutrition deaths.

Map 19. Proportion of unimmunised children.

Map 20. Proportion of vaccine preventable deaths (Whooping cough, Polio, Diphtheria, Measles, Tetanus).

Oh, but he’s a fighter. It’s just that, every now and then, he’d like to eat something…

Map 21. Proportion of hungry children.

Despite horrendous odds, the child grows up to be a man. He is illiterate, hungry, homeless, jobless – but that’s the least of his worries. There are disease-loops he’ll have to go through all over again – diseases different from the ones he escaped from as a kid.

Map 22. Proportion of of world population suffering from Diabetes.

Map 23. Proportion of deaths due to Dengue.

Map 24. Proportion of deaths due to Tuberculosis.

Down and out in Delhi and Mumbai, the young man still hasn’t lost hope. He coughs blood as he paddles his rickshaw, and with great difficulty, barely able to make it to a clinic, he collapses on a stretcher. On which lie three patients.

Map 25. Proportion of world population facing acute health worker shortage.

Baad mein aana, come later, they tell him, peeling him off from the stretcher like one scrapes off a leftover meal from a thali. He leaves, to die another day.

Mother India isn’t always so bloated, and all these maps aren’t identical even if they appear to be so. Look. She’s on a diet. How thin she’s become.

Map 26. Proportion of Public Health spending across the world.

But why on earth should we aspire to be thin? Haven’t our grandmothers always prided in the mota and the taaza?

 Map 27. Proportion of worldwide spending on Arms imports.

There, there, comforts the mother as she cradles her child. There, there.

The child is suffocating – his mouth has been pressed so damn hard on his mother’s breast in the hope of a drop, a solitary drop. The gentle pats turn to angry thumps, and the lap is agitating as though it is being run on a motor, and now the child starts to cry, and the mother says, shush, shush, there, there, my baby, my sweet baby, the love of my life, on you rests my future and the future of my great nation, and the mother breaks into a lullaby that talks of a nation that once was a sone ki chidiya, and this is how a day ends and another begins in this big fat bloated country of ours.

Author’s note: This revolutionary method of cartography, where each country is sized according to the input variable (e.g. population, health spending, mortality figures, etc) is based on the work of Michael T Gastner and MEJ Newman, described in their landmark 2004 paper: Diffusion-based method for producing density-equalizing maps (http://www.pnas.org/content/101/20/7499.full). All maps shown here are the latest available from Worldmapper on a given theme with data sourced mostly from the 2004 or 2005 WHO and UN Human Development Reports. They can be found at http://www.worldmapper.org and www.viewsoftheworld.net © Copyright Benjamin D. Hennig (Worldmapper Project).