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Belated Reactions to the Poverty Debate Uncouth politicians apart, I am appalled by the misleading discussion by well-informed academics to score cheap brownie points and hog prime time TV limelight. Mihir Shah (The Hindu, 5-Aug-2013) benevolently laments: "There could not be a more ridiculous tragedy of errors on all sides." But this spectacle is surely neither comedy nor tragedy; it involves unethical and unprofessional populist posturing to the point of being utterly disgusting! In one debate (in one of the previous rounds) there was a well-known academic (don't recall the name) who came into the studio flaunting a pouch of the costliest available full-cream milk in Delhi so that the idiots in audience like me shouldn't miss her much laboured point. She dramatically waves that and thunders: How can a mother buy her hungry child a pouch of milk if her "income" is as "prescribed" by planning commission experts? What, indeed, can the poor BPL