http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1979/teresa-bio.html ght as well be living in two different countries. Mother Teresa herself would sometimes toss out a statistic or two, softly to be sure but chilling nevertheless: 300 million people living below the poverty line, millions more with options for economic mobility denied. Where were the jobs, she would ask, where was the large-scale investment in human development? What happened to the vision of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, India's founding fathers, for a just India? Powerful questions, articulated by a simple woman whose frail body packed more power than any other contemporary world figure. Like Gandhi, that power, of course, flowed from her spiritual wellspring. And like Gandhi, Mother Teresa was an unelected spokesman for the poor everywhere -- not simply highlighting their despair but also underscoring their hopes. At a time when majority-Hindu fundamentalism was on the rise and Muslims were becoming increasingly worried about their identity in supposedly secular India, no one dared to ask what business did a Christian missionary have representing India on the global stage. When she spoke, all India listened, the world took notice. No small feat that, especially when India's political stature has shrunk internationally in direct proportion to the growth of her social malaise and political corruption. Implicit in what Mother Teresa said was also an indictment of the international development organizations whose many billions had fattened bureaucracies but not sufficiently lifted the poor from their hovels. You did not have to be Indian to understand what she said: just ask the denizens of slums in dozens of Western countries that Mother Teresa visited and where her charitable organizations worked. That is not to say Mother Teresa's judgment was unassailable on every issue. In a nation that adds 20 million people each year -- more than the entire population of Australia -- Mother Teresa stubbornly resisted family planning programs. In keeping with her conservative Catholic beliefs, she was vehemently opposed to abortion, which is permitted in India. Some advocates of social development, such as U.N. bureaucrats, privately fretted that Mother Teresa was the biggest stumbling block to the international family planning movement, bigger than America's "right-to life" movement and Ronald Reagan in his heyday as U.S. president. Some accused her of being an ideologue, even though her prescription for India's population problem was predicated on the overriding belief that every child has the inalienable right to the pursuit of a full, happy life free from the malignancy of poverty. Her work in Calcutta's slums illustrated something that the high priests of global development often tend to overlook: in order to pull people out of poverty, it is important to first empower them with self-esteem and with the hope that change is always possible.
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