On Money

A poor man is as good as a dead one.

The above piece of wisdom is compliments of the Ramayan, not the Republican party. The Ramayan argues that enlightenment requires peace of mind and time for leisure and further that an empty wallet does not provide either.

Had he been around, Valmiki would have told newly independent India that simple living and high thinking don't mix very well together. It is not an accident that so many of the great philosophers of the past were born rich. Buddha was. Gandhi was. Akbar was. Ashoka was. Universal love for mankind is not a thought that sits well on an empty stomach. Nor is an empty stomach satiated by the slogans of the left.

A failure to acknowledge the importance of personal motivation and incentives for work meant a half hearted jump from feudal to a socialist economy. My teacher at primary school bemoaned a poor India, and attributed the nations backwardness to its people's laziness. It took me many years to realize that the problem was not the people, it was the politics. One of the saddest consequences of all this is the continuing persistence of that pestilence called caste. Caste is not some kind of preordained thing unique to India. The British stressed "knowing ones place". The Japanese had a full fledged caste system, dominated by the Samurai. Several societies came out of this darkness, or at least made it tolerably mild. India could not because that leveling road roller called money has not yet run our lands.

Many an enterprising individual in India have risen through the caste system by the right application of money and power. It is not for nothing that newly crowned kings were suddenly discovered to be direct descendents of Indra and Surya. Economics is the basis for caste, and Society, Culture and Race play a decidedly secondary role, if that. As usual, another Indian epic manages to put it much more succinctly than I can.

If Race is the basis of caste, then all castes are mixed castes.


This quote from Mahabharat was probably penned at least a couple of thousand years ago. If all castes were mixed castes when Jesus walked, then today's Indian can rightfully and proudly claim to have a gene pool as confused as a hammer head shark spontaneously flickering into existence a mile high in the sky. Yet some persist, trying to associate themselves with purity, when what defines pure has itself been lost in the mists of time.

Chasing money has a proven track record of being more compelling and entertaining than chasing purity. It is even ultimately a more rewarding occupation, at least for the society if not for a every individual. Chasing after purity has given mankind such gifts as the Holocaust (Pure Race), Communism (Pure Left) and the Great Depression (Pure Right). I wish for a world where we escape the strangle of ideology, be it of whatever direction or color. There is no reason why we cannot have the freedom of capitalism with a healthy helping of the humanism of socialism. The fool on my TV is screaming this is not possible. He claims ideological purity is everything. So does Bin Laden.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Nazi Sympathizers in Britain

An illuminating article by Christopher Hitchens about how both the abdicating King Edward and the new King George were and remained Nazi sympathizers well after the Czech sellout. Hitchens cannot resist needling Churchill too. But Churchill's seems to have been found guilty mostly by association with King Edward, not because of any explicit Nazi sympathies. Here is however a funny line about how Churchill once called himself the lone warrior against the twin evils of Hitler and Gandhi! Hitchens is obviously disgusted with the British Monarchy and end the article by with memorable flourish. Almost the entire moral capital of this rather odd little German dynasty is invested in the post-fabricated myth of its participation in "Britain's finest hour." In fact, had it been up to them, the finest hour would never have taken place. So this is not a detail but a major desecration of the historical record—now apparently gliding unopposed toward a baptism by Oscar.
Read more

A historical perspective of India

Excerpts from what promises to be a brilliant book by Ramachandran Guha. The great 19th-century poet Ghalib thought that God was indeed on the side of India. All around him there was conflict and privation, but doomsday had not yet come. "Why does not the Last Trumpet sound?", asked Ghalib of a sage in the holy city of Benares. "Who holds the reins of the Final Catastrophe?" he continued. This was the answer he got: The hoary old man of lucent ken Pointed towards Kashi and gently smiled. 'The Architect,' he said, 'is fond of this edifice Because of which there is colour in life; He Would not like it to perish and fall.'
Read more

Indian Elections

In the recent elections in the North East, one election official dejectedly told the media how the politicians undermine the people's faith in democracy for 5 years and the Election Commission does its best to restore it, if only for the one day on which polling happens. This detailed and interesting article by Mr. Gopalaswami, Chief Election Commissioner of India about the recent election in UP is inspiring in that it restored my faith in the ability of our Government organisations to do their job exceptionally well. Since bogus voting can be largely prevented only if the identity of the voters is correctly established, a massive attempt was made to issue Electoral Photo Identity Cards (EPIC). Between December 2006 and the second week of April, 2007, a total of 2.69 crore EPICs were issued covering 22% of the electorate throughout the state, raising the coverage to an average of 80% in the state. As many as 85% voters who turned up to vote produced the EPIC as identity while the
Read more