This is a transcript of the keynote address delivered by Harsh Mander on Albert Schweitzer Day in Aspen on July 1.We are living through profoundly troubled times. So much that is most precious in our world is badly broken – kindness, justice, love, courage, caring, compassion and empathy.Look at the world today. Democracy is crumbling in country after country. We see the hubris of highly centralised, opaque decision-making that abandons the poor and is worryingly crony capitalist.Never before in human history have so few men owned so much. Unimaginable levels of wealth are concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, while millions continue to endure desperate hunger, dead-end insecure jobs at dirt wages, homelessness and disease.A trillion dollars is the wealth today of one single man. If he spends a million dollars every single day, it would take 2,700 years for his wealth to get exhausted. Yet one in 12 people in the world sleep hungry every night, one in two are denied affordable healthcare, and one in five children are malnourished.The pandemic dramatically laid bare, with ruthless moral clarity, the catastrophic public costs of inequality. Millions of lives could have been saved if over many decades, states had made much greater investments in public health provisioning. And the explosion of mass hunger and joblessness and the mass dislocation of millions of working poor people could have been averted, had labour protections, social security and wage levels of workers been secured, and had governments ensured more money in the hands of every poor person.Credit: AFP.I am convinced that when the history of these times will be written, this will be recorded as one of the cruel periods of human history. There was of course much greater destitution, famine, epidemics in the past. But today the world has the resources many times over to ensure that no child sleeps hungry, no child dies because they cannot afford health care. We have the capacity to end all of this, but we choose not to.Soaring inequality runs hand in hand with surging politics of hate: hate that threatens and targets vulnerable minorities, immigrants and the working poor. It has everywhere become more and more dangerous to be a minority of any kind. They face persecution for the colour of their skin, the god they worship, their caste, their gender, their language and who they choose to love.Each day there are new stories, sombre stories of surging hate, fear and inequality. This fraught and pitiless age is a moment of profound moral crisis.Humankind has clearly lost its way.I stand here in memory of Albert Schwietzer. He spoke to humankind during another moment of civilisational crisis, when the world was broken like it is today – broken by deadly wars, colonial oppression, the devastation wrought by the nuclear bomb and the genocide of the Holocaust.He spoke luminously of “reverence for life”, for every life. We need once again today to heed his words, to affirm that every life is worthy of reverence. No life is dispensable. No life is of any lesser dignity and worth.In recent years, both my parents died, my mother in her late 80s, my father when he was 94. Over the years before they passed away, they were in and out of hospitals, sometimes for many months at a stretch. I tried always to be by their side, immensely grateful each time that they recovered, granting us a few more years, months, days of their lives.But one thought would haunt me through all of this. My parents could afford the scandalous hospital bills only because of their privilege. If we were poor, there is no way my parents could have lived so long. While I was blessed that they were alive, I was continuously mindful of the cold reality that in my country – and in much of the world – a person’s access to health care does not depend on how urgent her need is. It depends instead on how lofty is her privilege. To be poor condemns you to early preventable death.I think of the homeless mentally ill women I often see in our city streets squatting on trash dumps. Covered with grime. Matted, unkempt hair. Nearly naked. Name forgotten. Family forgotten. Muttering inscrutable words. Solitary. Profoundly lost to the world.I long, achingly, for a world where she has exactly the same chances of life as my mother had, that she is treated in the same hospitals with the same respect, dignity and care where my mother received the healing that added many precious years to her life.A world in which there is equal reverence for her life.Can we draw people of every social class and identity into a wide public debate about building a new social contract that ensures that no human being is allowed to fall below an agreed floor of human dignity.What is this floor? For me, I imagine a social contract in which no child will sleep hungry, no child will sleep under the open sky, no child will be sent to work instead of a school which is as good a school as for any other child her age, no person will be subjected to discrimination or violence because of her identity, no person will be denied free, good-quality healthcare, and no older person will have to work or beg to live with dignity. We must demand that we find the resources for all of this by greater taxing of the super-rich.Thinking of Albert Schwietzer’s life all these decades later, I feel a particular kinship to his years of work with people living with leprosy in Africa. Some of the most formative experiences of my early work life was also with people with leprosy. In the 1980s, the number of leprosy patients worldwide was over five million. Around half of these were in India, many of them indigenous people in the impoverished forested regions of central India where I served as an Indian civil servant.My first posting was in a subdivision called Barwani. I was 27. A procession of protesters arrived outside my office one morning. This one was strikingly different from any that I had encountered. It was a motley gathering of “burnt-out” leprosy patients, led by a communist school teacher. I say “burnt-out” echoing the title of Graham Greene’s classic novel about a leprosy colony in the upper reaches of the Congo river – A Burnt-Out Case. These were people who had been infected with leprosy, people who displayed signs of the terrifying consequences of this infection – dreaded for millennia – such as discoloured skin, damaged eyes, broken noses and stumps in the place of fingers and toes.When I sat with them in my office, I found that their demands were heartbreakingly modest. It was a time when it was not uncommon for towns and cities to have savagely segregated settlements for people with leprosy in their outer periphery. Exiled to an unsanitary patch of land outside the town, unserved by any public services, all they sought for their shabby neighbourhood was a drinking water point, some drainage for the lowland swamp which they inhabited and possibly some street lighting. I promised that I would ensure these. But I added that I would love to visit them in their homes.My visit to their colony – to which I then kept returning – revealed to me a people more ferociously ostracised than any whom I have met before -or since. Their monumental tragedy was that although their infection was entirely curable, it contained within it the unbearable burdens of millennia of brutal stigma and prejudice. The result of this was that the moment their infection was detected and known, they would be cast away even by those they loved the most – their parents, their spouses, their children. They would be banished from their homes and their villages.A man affected by leprosy receives a biscuit from a passer-by at the Chetna Leprosy colony in Siliguri in January 2017. Credit: AFP.They would scour for food in waste dumps and ultimately find their way to a shabby ghetto of women, men and children who had similarly been expelled from home and family because of their infection with leprosy. There they would join a new community of exiles, often find a new partner and start a new family of the expelled. But they would be mercilessly and violently despised by the town residents. So would their children. None would give them work. None would admit their children in schools. To survive, they would line the streets all day, seeking alms by displaying their deformed limbs and sores to despising eyes. Some coins were thrown at them from a distance.I recalled a slogan I had heard: I do not want your charity. I only want a chance. I asked the residents of the leprosy colony one evening who among them wished to give up begging and find dignified work. They immediately all raised their damaged hands and this, for me, lit up the skyline. I brought together a band of compassionate Barwani residents to work with me to help organise for them the “chance” that the slogan iridescently spoke of.We organised for them very modest but clean housing, employment in weaving and brick making, a child care centre, admission in schools and a local clinic. We called their new settlement Asha Gram, or a Village of Hope. For decades after my transfer from Barwani, I would return to Asha Gram with my family to celebrate Diwali or the new year with them in friendship and to watch with wonder and admiration as they built dignity and hope from the ravages and ruins of their past lives.After this, in every district I worked, I sought out the inevitable leprosy settlement and tried to help them escape the dark despair and degradation to which they had been banished by the stigma of their ailment. Many Sunday mornings, my routine was to go to the leprosy colony with my daughter in my arms and join the residents for a meal, as my daughter played with their children. Some lifelong friendships emerged.The central lesson I learned was that their malady was not the bacteria; it was uninformed and brutal societal prejudice and hate. Once when these are overcome can humankind leave behind these horrific tragedies that have come down from centuries. This has begun to happen. The numbers of leprosy infections have reduced to 200,000. India still reports 60% of the cases.With leprosy, two other maladies preoccupied me over the years. Both of these, not unlike leprosy, are the outcomes of stigma and gross impoverishment.One of these is tuberculosis. The other is mental illness.Let me speak here of TB. First, a brief biographical detail. In 2002, after a frenzy of religious violence largely targeting the Muslim minority in the western state of Gujarat (where the chief minister was Narendra Modi, destined to later become India’s prime minister), I quit my position in the civil service in protest, convinced that this was a state-sponsored massacre. I devoted a lot of my time after leaving the government to working with the survivors of hate violence in Gujarat and other parts of the country.I also started work with rough-sleeping homeless people in Delhi and other cities, and on the questions of hunger and starvation. In the course of our work of street medicine, we learned that rough-sleeping homeless people were five to ten times more at risk of death than people who slept under a roof. We discovered also that one paramount cause of premature death among homeless people was TB. Friends from the University College of London actively screened the population of homeless men on the banks of the Yamuna River in Delhi and found among them, to their consternation and alarm, a higher incidence of TB than anything they had encountered anywhere in the world.A Vietnamese doctor examines a drug-resistant TB patient at a hospital in Hanoi. Credit: AFP.Why homeless men in Delhi show higher levels of TB than most other populations in the world, we don’t fully understand, except that TB is classically a malady arising from deep impoverishment. But we understand better the tragic trajectory typical of a homeless person who picks up the TB bacteria. After they contract the ailment, they continue to work until they become too feeble for physical labour, meaning they are unable to earn even minimal wages to buy food to stay alive. If, somehow, they do succeed in finding a bed in the highly overcrowded TB hospital, after a few days the doctor would discharge them to make room for the next in a long queue of waiting patients.Perhaps the doctor would give them with terse but well-meaning counsel – “Go home, rest, be regular with your medicine, let your family take care of you, and eat nourishing food”.But doesn’t the doctor understand? I don’t have a family, I don’t have a home, then what do I do?I have no option except to return to the streets and die!Unwilling to accept the incontrovertibility of this reality, we searched desperately for solutions to save the lives of homeless people who are infected with TB. And as with most worthy ideas, the solution in the end was simple. For at least a year after a homeless person is diagnosed with TB, we would create a space of rest, treatment, healing and care that substitutes for the absent family. We called these “recovery shelters” and opened these shelters in four Indian cities – Delhi, Jaipur, Hyderabad and Patna. There were numerous challenges in these efforts, but the results were immensely heartening. Many homeless people who came to us close to death recovered and walked out a year later, able now to return to the world.The crises of our world are not just of inequality, or of the climate crisis. We are riven by the politics of hate, within and between nations.The Nazi history of Germany in the early 1930s must always be a reminder that democracy is not just the rule of the majority, because that can mutate into fascism. Democracy is equally the protection of every minority, of all their freedoms, including their freedom to be themselves, to worship, speak, dress and love as they choose, and yet be equal citizens in every way.Look at the flexing and rhetoric of war in the world today. One head of government is kidnapped, another assassinated. The most powerful countries in the world – including my own - are silent or actively support the televised slaughter of children, aid workers, doctors and press persons.We are witness to a new arms race. I recall the words of President Eisenhower way back in 1953, that “every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who are hungry and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” He further warned that a world enmeshed in an arms race was expending not merely money, but “the sweat of its labourers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children”.Let me speak mostly of my own country. There are terrifying echoes in India today not just of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, but also of Jim Crow’s America, and the genocide of the Rohingya of Myanmar. The Indian people have strayed far from the dreams of India’s freedom struggle, and the pledges of India’s constitution that India would be a country that was just, equal and kind.A country where it would not matter which god you worship or if you worship no god, it would not matter what was your caste, ethnicity, race, gender, wealth; you would be a fully equal citizen in every way, of equal worth and equal rightsInstead, India today is in the throes of an epidemic of hate. There was one partition in the land of India in 1947. Today in my country we are seeing a million partitions of the heart.