Thursday, November 5, 2009

Greed is too Good!

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Greed is too Good!

My online Webster defines ‘greed’ as: ‘A selfish and excessive desire for more of something (as money) than is needed’.

Noah Webster is clearly ‘hedging’ (which he defines as: ‘evading the risk of commitment especially by leaving open a way of retreat’).

The vexed ‘Umbrella Devotee’ of R. K. Narayan fumes: ‘I have five umbrellas because I like to have five; I have as much right to have five umbrellas as you have five fingers on your hand’. And he is ever wary of parting with any of them.

Is he greedy? The burden of RKN’s essay is that he is not.

Webster keeps open his ‘way of retreat’ in his last word: ‘need’. The Umbrella Devotee thinks he ‘needs’ his five.

‘Need’ varies from person to person. Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said: ‘Give me the luxuries of life; and I will dispense with its necessities’.

I myself ‘badly need’ just what the witches in the forest gifted Goopy Gayen-Bagha Bayen; I will be content and ask no more. Or, just the one wish-fulfilling statuette ‘Paathaal Bhairavi’ (I don’t wish to be reminded that, after much murder and mayhem, the goddess in the movie is urged to please take back the accursed thing).

Am I greedy? Well, the charming Goopy and Bagha are the epitome of Bengali ‘greedlessness’ (like Humpty Dumpty, I define it as the opposite of the Harshad Mehta syndrome).

HM shocked my Bengali Theoretical Physicist friend and room mate numb: for days on end he just couldn’t digest that figure of ‘Rs. 4000 Crores’!.

Rs. 4000 crores is passé these days. Today’s headlines say that an unnamed ex-chief minister amassed that much in less than six months and also stashed away an unknown amount in Swiss Banks.

Well, the currency of ‘greed’ varies. In the Wonderland of Academics, it is counted in how many ‘papers’ one publishes and how many Ph. D.’s one guides. I hear of an Academic the bound volume of whose CV is twice as bulky as a typical Ph. D. thesis.

The Nobel-winning Feynman had only 30 odd papers to his credit and was reluctant to guide any Ph. D. students after his first (once bitten twice shy!). But he concedes that his greed for ‘fame’ was insatiable; he was snubbed by his colleague Abraham Pais: ‘Publicity is a whore’!

When I retired after 40 years in Bengal and tried settling down in Hyderabad in its boom time, the daunting Malls here were aglow with flashing Neon Signs: ‘Greed is Good!’. And there was no standing room for venerable Senior Citizens like me in their stalls.

It is a different matter that all those beckoning lights dimmed and died in a couple of years; and I can now squat in these Malls and swat flies.

In my late teens I had a friend who did his Diploma in Civil Engineering and was just then employed as a small time Supervisor of Constructions. Within six months he used to talk of everyone’s Bank balance in terms of how many ‘houses’ they could buy.

The famous Tolstoy story: ‘How Much Land Does a Man Need?’, ends with the pithy sentence: ‘Six feet from his head to his heels was all he needed’. And his admirer Gandhijee hinted: ‘Mother Earth has enough to quench each one’s need but not their greed’.

In one of those days of the real estate Big Bang, a Hyderabadi ‘know-all’ urged me to quickly buy a 2-BHK flat of 1000 sft at the going rate of Rs. 50 lakhs in his middle class locality because the prices of land, steel, cement and the works were hitting the roof and would touch the sky within a couple of months.

But God gave me only Rs. 15 lakhs as my Retirement Fund. Within six months the prices tumbled to Rs. 18 lakhs; and still no takers. The Banks are vying with one another begging even me to take a ‘Dream-Home-Loan’ on ‘Reverse Mortgage’.

I am demurring, ‘dreaming’ that they would touch down the Rs. 15 lakhs rock bottom line one of these days.

Am I greedy? I should ask Noah Webster.

Last Laugh: We now come to Noah Webster’s bracketed dirty word: ‘Money’: Today’s newspaper has this piquant item:

“The Columbian cocaine baron, Escobar on the run, is said to have burned over $ 1.5 million in hard cash in one night just to keep his daughter warm in a cold mountain hideout”. 


He couldn't have burned houses and gold though...

Money has many uses and can be heart-warming! What do you say, Noahjee?

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