Initially, the world started with the invention of the wheel
the people were so elated that everyone made a wheel out of wood or stone and
used it. The world at that moment was self-reliant what all they had was what
all they wanted. They didn't care to store for more because they had everything
around them and they were subservient. This was termed as existentialism. But then
again it is said conditions change from time to time and things did change the
world took a turn when concept of king was introduced amongst them where one
single head was rich enough and smart enough for all the luxuries to be
adorned. He ruled the place and he started a method of exchange called as the
barter system, it was a reward for the hard-working and degraded denomination
for those who didn't work. The kings were hereditary or non-hereditary; it
depended on the era and the place. At some places the kings squandered money,
while at some place the made an exhilarating progress- the various eras had
been a witness to that. Looking other way around, the earlier one was a Communist
era while the later one was a Dictatorial or the Imperialistic. Let’s not get
into the details of these because the newspapers these days tell about that
enough with the amount of shape-shifting changes going around in the world.
The barter system was an implicit system of the particular
empire where the people bartered or gave away the things they had in abundance
to the things they needed. That can also be termed as the self-reliant method. Isn’t
it? Keeping only the things you needed and giving away the rest to someone in
need. The world was a much more harmonious place back then as the greedy motives
of the people didn’t come in between these transactions. There was no barter
made that- if I give you an onion one has to give 100 potatoes for that. It was
as simple as an ‘eye for an eye’. People
lived a lucid life which used didn’t raise much beyond what they need and what
they had. But then came the era of the transcendental progress. The unprecedented
progress allowed all the bread earners to have a much more decent life than
before.
I’m talking about the industrial era where the concept of
money and economy arose. The need to own and collect things was so distinct
that they lost the single fact that they needed only what they wanted and spare
the luxury. One can term that to be the unambitious behaviour of the recent era
but I term it as the self-reliantness of the era. Because people had what they
needed yet there wasn’t much better progress than -when people had everything
that they wanted. The deviltry of the newer eras were not less when the Fords
manufactured the least costliest black car (though they were costly) to the
common man, the Wright brothers made aeroplanes, the governments of the
countries which forced labourers to work half the wages for more hours. But right
now when we look at the development we find it breath-taking –one cannot deny
the lives aimlessly lost behind such a development. The development might have
had happened anyways a decade give or take. Yet, the human greed we say doesn’t
stop till the end. My grandfather used to tell this story:
There was this old man who earned a lot in his lifetime, he
had nearly half of the town under his control, the lands and the workers (the
concept of bonded labour cannot be forgotten in the early Indian eras). You can
name it and he owned it all. But the only feature that god bestowed on him was –he
was a miser. He couldn’t spend a penny. He would always look up for a half in a
paisa. But then whatever approaches to everyone- his end approached. The day he
thought he was going to die he had all his family members gather around him so
that he could tell them something. The sons thought that their father would
tell them about his will, the daughters about the gold and the wife about the
money he will leave behind. And exactly at the moment of his end he instructed
his son to come near because he wanted to say something after all his life was
about to pass out. So the biggest son neared his ear to his dying father’s
mouth thinking that his father would say that he has left the power of attorney
to his estate to him. But the father said,” there is a cow eating our vegetables
in the vineyard. Go and shoo her away”. And with that he left his breath.
The story sounded hilarious to me at the beginning because I
didn’t understand the need of money and the present scenario concept for the
time being. But now I realise that how compassionate we have become for
ourselves so that we cannot let others have a moment of happiness. The old
fellow was in such a state that even though the cow ate up his whole vineyard
it would never have had affected him. But we are never able to let things go. We
can’t let go a Rs.10 note to a deserving beggar or for a person in need. We have
become so much negatively passionate about things, though these things are
never going to last! Out hunger for these things and the vices from them has
become so insatiable that we drown with them only. Then again with all this
money comes a lot of vices too. People who are insanely rich have often been known
to do things that when the world found out they were just left spellbound “The secret life of Malcolm Forbes” or
the Indian example of recently incarcerated self-styled godman-Asaram and his
son’s philandering habits. Whenever we dig deeper into lives of such people we
find out dirty secrets of people who have abused their spouses, killed or
covered up someone, have a hand in extortion, drug abuse or human trafficking. You
can name the famous Jimmy Hoffer and his mysterious disappearance or the
dubious death death of Marilyn Monroe and the involvement of elite brothers
with that case.
People always see the money behind these things but nobody
sees the lives money has ruined. One can term it as the short-sightedness of the
human mind or the ignorance of the same mind. I term it as the side where we
imagine ourselves to be so intelligent that these things would never affect us.
But these things do have a way of inadvertently affecting us without our
knowledge. Then again what can we do at those points? The answer is “what we do
at those crucial moments define who we actually are. We cannot shrug off the
momentary pleasures the world bestows on us. We should enjoy those but our
ability to see people being a part of those pleasure and our decisions to help them
will take us a long way than storing all the best things till the last- where
we won’t be able to enjoy them. The effort to do the right thing at right time
will define who we actually are.
