We all have our very personal problems. No one is exempt from them. We see our friends and neighbours and assume that all is well with them, just as they may make the natural enough assumption that no other than themselves is troubled by unfortunate circumstances in their lives that continue to afflict them and them only. We keep our misfortune, for the most part, carefully guarded from public scrutiny. They are our problems to solve.

And what appears to us to be dreadfully troubling and very personal is likely shared by countless others who experience the very same troubling details in their lives that make them miserable, shading their satisfaction with life a deep purple bruise of discontent.

But everything is relative isn't it? Where once mothers used to chide their children who left part of their meal on their discarded dinner plates, admonishing their disinterested psyches that children in Africa were starving, now we have only to look for the odd little item in our daily newspapers that remind us, alongside the large, blaring headlines focusing on brutal strife somewhere in the world, that our problems are minuscule in comparison to the plight that others find themselves in through an accident of birth and geography.

Take, for example, a small, very small and brief news-note at the bottom of an inside newspaper page toward the very back of the day's issue where the top banner reads "World":

India -- Children forced to live by parents' graves
Five children have been thrown out of their homes and are living by the graves of their parents who died of AIDS in a northern Indian village. District administrator Vidya Bhushan says they were ostracized by villagers who feared the four brothers and one sister, between the ages of 7 and 17, were infected with the HIV virus. They have been living on the outskirts of their village, Nishar Bano, one of the children told Eenadu Hindi television News. Authorities will be providing them with housing and organize medical checkups to allay villagers' fears, Bhushan said.