India's space program is a huge point of pride for their country (and rightfully so).

They have problems to solve. It doesn't mean that it's wrong to spend a (relatively) tiny amount of money to give people something to aspire to, and to take pride in accomplishing together. We can do two things at once.

You're only focus on the space program because it's technically similar to food insecurity. But you're ignoring the 50% of the economy which is focused on -- let's be honest -- irrelevant shit. Incredible sums of money (and time and effort) go towards entertainment (hollywood), fashion, jewelry, vacations, and other luxuries.

If you want to divert more resources towards solving world hunger, take it from Hollywood. You don't need to strip bare a source of inspiration that unites people and moves humanity forward.

It’s valid to spend money on entertainment as an individual and all economies in the world have significant portions of the productivity of their population going towards “irrelevant shit”. India spending money on a space program seems like an insignificant amount of money to me compared to their total population and is likely not enough money to solve their food problems. We agree on this part. I spend money on vapid shit every day and so do millions of other people. They’re not bad.

But, total resources for a Mars colonization effort seems like an order of magnitude more expensive than a simple space program for the benefit of an order of magnitude fewer people. In addition, the capital that is contributing to these efforts (ie Bezos and Musk money) is much more concentrated and can be mobilized in a much more precise manner. I don’t see Mars colonization as a source of inspiration outside of these SV types, and that’s not a significant enough population for me to find this justifiable.

One problem is political, and therefore not solvable. We wouldn't like most of the ways it could be made solvable, and I'm sure there are no ways that everybody would approve of.

The other is technical (for now) -- hard, but trivial.

I think this is it. Difficult problems seem way more difficult to actually solve than technical problems at the end of the day. I just wish that helping other humans was seen as a good enough reason to supersede these political difficulties.