For my very dear pal Q, who has shown me a lot of importance down the years, and taught me much

Kurdish musician Yabroni and one of his three daughters (i do not know her name). Father, daughter, and her two sisters all now live in the refugee camp at Harmanli in Bulgaria, having fled their native Al-Hasakah in Syria. (Credit to YouTube user Krassimir Yankov for the upload.)

The World Bank defines extreme poverty, as someone getting by on less than US$1.25 a day. This sounds arbitrary but it’s a baseline. Put aside, for a moment, valid debates about monetised baselines as the paradigm for measuring affliction in this world ruled by economists (and how human development seems to necessarily entail the scouring of our finite planet, and how this is all caught up in fundamentally unjust relations of power in a white supremacist world structured by European-authored imperialism).

The number of extremely poor is currently about 1.2 billion people, says the Bank: nearly one in five human beings.

Anyway, this chart has been doing the rounds as the Bank released a report last week. One in three very poor people (by this measurement) are in India, with its overall population of about 1.2 billion people. The DR Congo sticks out of the countries doing the worst in per head terms, though, if you consider its population; and Tanzania, really. China’s population is about 1.3 billion, Nigeria about 177 million, Bangladesh about 166 million. The DRC’s population is about 77 million and Tanzania about 50 million. (Pakistan’s population is about 196 million currently, Indonesia’s maybe 253 million, and Ethiopia’s about 96 million, whilst Kenya’s is a somewhat more modest 45 million or so. These population estimates for mostly mid-2014 were lifted from the CIA factbook.)

Their going looked like a disaster