THE IRONIC WORLD

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.