What is the similarity between the poor and the rich?
They both want more money.
Let’s start as poor peeps
If you don’t mind, I will be making you the head of a poverty-stricken household with a wife and 2 schoolchildren and calling you Ameer (oh, the irony!).
You are a driver to a somewhat rich household and your day job is driving your employers in a car to wherever their fancy wants them to be.
Your wife, Shanti works as a maid.
You earn Rs 18,000 in your job, your wife brings in another Rs 7k with her part-time, and sometimes more if she is lucky.
You have two kids Raja and Rani, and you are educating in the best private school you can afford so that they can get their generation out of the poverty you live in.
Funds are always in deficit, but you manage.
You cannot afford toys and such luxuries for your kids, but the basics are covered at least.
Sometimes you come across a lottery ticket booth promising Rs 3 lakh reward for winners.
If I get 3 lakhs, all my money problems will be solved, you think.
So you buy the Rs 250 ticket the first month, another the second month and in the third month, the booth guy recognises when you walk in.
“Aise nahi chalega bhaiya. Jyada ticket loge tabhi toh aapke jeetne ka chance rahega!“ (This won’t work brother. You can only increase your chance of winning by buying more tickets!)
Ab baat toh sahi ki (he said the right thing). So you buy 3 more tickets, totalling Rs 1000.
The booth waale bhaiya asks you to get at least 4 more, but no. This is all you can afford.
Small note here.
As people who studied probability and statistics, we know that assuming a 1000 tickets are sold (many more, but let’s consider 1000 for simplicity sake), your chances after buying from 1 to 4 ticket just went from 1/1000 to 4/1000, or from 0.0001 to 0.0004.
Ameer is not as educated as us unfortunately, so he hasn’t yet figured out that the booth waala bhaiya is not as concerned about helping him win as he is with increasing the sales of his ticket.
You will figure it out eventually, hopefully perhaps.
That night, you take home those 4 tickets and have a quarrel with your wife Shanti.
“Waise hee paise nahi hai, 1000 Rs barbaad krke aa gaye janaab“ (There is already a deficit a money and he wasted a Rs 1000)
“Jab jeetenge na toh tumhe ache restaurant mein khaana khilaunga. Chinta kyu karti ho?“ (When we win, I will treat you to meal in a good restaurant. Why are you worried?)
But you don’t win. You don’t win with 4 tickets the next time, with 8 tickets the next time, or the 12 tickets you tensely bought even though Shanti has stopped talking to you completely.
But you go to get the ticket next time, all tense, worried and sweaty.
Your marriage is in the danger of falling apart, the kids know something is up. The landlord sneered and increased the rent this month. Yesterday your employer chided you for always being distracted and wanting easy money.
The booth waala bhai is busy sweet-talking another customer into buying 2 more tickets, and boy does it seem familiar.
Isn’t this how you both first started talking? He seemed so concerned about you not winning, your growing problems and filled you with hope - when you win, you will show them.
Sab kuch khatm hai… Even if you could cry, there is no point. A substantial portion of your monthly income has already gone into trying your way to luck.
What the hell, you think. Itna paisa waste ho gaya hai, itne mein pee hii leta (So much money has been wasted, I could have gotten drunk with it)
That night your friends convince you to drink yourself silly.
Your wife’s body and your children’s tears are the price for all that money spent, and thus begins a perpetual cycle of addiction, abuse, apathy and regret.
What do you think is the moral of the story?
Do you think Ameer can raise his children out of the hellhole he lives in?
The greed of Rs 3 lakh leads the family which was on its way out back again to the same pits of hell they tried rising against.
Ameer will probably realise too late that his responsibilities were not the letdowns, he himself was.
His wife will steadily lose her dedication towards her husband, sacrifice herself to protect her children. Or more accurately, she will maintain the delusion of an ‘always right’ husband to keep coping with her reality, to keep justifying why she protects and not rebels. Her children will be disillusioned about the world before they even see it.
They will go out in hopes of finding the love they could not get inside their home, and lose their way just like their father did.
Perhaps the lottery wala is to blame for the downfall of a family.
But even that bhaiya isn’t exactly going to FD his money, is he?
He will probably spend his ill-acquired gains in stuff like alcohol or women, stuff that lasts only long as their luck and money do.
If all that extra money was really benefitting him, he would be rich one day, no? He probably gets better at slick-talking every time he slick-talks, eh?
There is a reason why some empires last thousands of years while other come and vanish in the blink of an eye.
Humans may last 60 to 100 years, but their mindset, the patterns they live by consciously or unconsciously, the beliefs they lived by persist through their children and the next generations.
In a civilisation where trying to climb up by destroying each other is the norm, one day comes when there remains nothing to destroy anymore.
I use big words like empire and civilisation, but on a smaller timescale this is just as valid for different societies.
Like the society of the rich, for example.
Can I douse you in luxury for a moment?
You are Gareebchand, the man leading a business empire of coal mining companies worth millions of dollars.
Your company, Koyela, is in a tough duopoly with the rival organisation Khudaai.
You live in a mansion-like home with your own huge lawn and swimming pool, are blessed with a beautiful sanskaari wife Komal you got married to when you were still hustling out there and also have 2 kids, Rao and Rai.
Your girlfriend Komal was desired by many men, and it was a desire to stand apart from those suitors that made you hustle as hard as you did.
You learnt from the best in Khudaai, saved money and contacts, got reduced to bones and sweat to make the first contract work, and kept at it until you are where you are.
You wanted to be someone from no one, but you ended up as the one.
People sneered at you earlier, and now they will happily grind their noses to your feet for a moment of your time.
You are who you once wanted to be.
And yet, something feels lacking.
You worked so hard to prove yourself to you, to your wife, her family and all friends.
Then why are you not happy now?
Maybe more wealth will cure it, maybe its because you still need to compete with what you left behind long ago.
You bribe the government officials to get your hands on more contracts, and succeed in securing them.
You increase your wealth by hundreds of millions more.
And yet you cannot find what you wanted to see in your wife’s eyes.
She is dismissive and physically present but mentally absent whenever you are around.
You mostly come back at 2 am or later after working yourself to the bone, but nothing is ever enough.
You begin to feel frustrated.
And then, as it always happens in serials, you start noticing the seductive new hire you got. She also seems sweet on you.
Instead of going back at 2, you just stop going home.
Passion lives here, in her arms. That mansion is an empty nest with empty people.
But all negligences incur losses. For Gareebchand, he first pays with his business.
His absence from office means more freedom to employees to take home what they want, and bit by bit the vultures chip away at your crown.
The investors flock back to Khudaai, and Koyela is dark once more.
By the time you come home, there is no home to come back to.
The secretary was just another vulture, the moment you could not afford another Gucci she suddenly started loving another man (boss?).
‘Main bass tumhe khush rakhna chahta tha’ (I just wanted to keep you happy)
‘Agar aap hain toh mereko aur kuch nahi chahie’ (If you are here, I don’t want anything else) Komal cooes.
She didn’t want more money, it turns out. She wants you. She married you because she loves you, you didn’t have to build an empire to get the respect she always had but couldn’t show.
The respect she couldn’t show because you were away working midnights at your different offices, and later bedrooms.
The core of Ameer, Gareebchand and their stories
Both men were not satisfied with what they had.
Both wanted more.
Both thought they needed more and more and more to be happy.
Both won in maintaining their home and failed to their greed.
Sadness, depression, hopelessness, misery, despair, pain…
They don’t creep in when our lives become difficult, they enter our lives when we close our eyes.
Happiness, joy, love, hope, life - it is present everywhere, in each corner of the world.
It is upto us whether we choose to acknowledge the happiness in our lives or not.
The world suffers when we choose to discount our blessings and ruthlessly ‘earn’ more from the world.
We may not feel it now, but we are harming ourselves, our loves ones and this whole world when we trod upon others after killing them for our greed.
The poor and the rich, why do they both need more?
Because none of them sees what they have, they only want more at the cost of this world’s peace.
The greatest sin we all commit is neglecting ourselves, disrespecting and insulting the goodness we all are born with.
We all need external validation, it is a basic psychological need. But those who cannot validate you for your presence will never validate you even for your wealth, they will only validate as long as they can either spend or have access to your wealth.
If you want to earn for yourself, that’s amazing! You are providing for yourself.
But ignoring what you already have and getting something because ‘I have nothing’ is a great disservice to ourselves.
Don’t be sad that you are born alone in this world and will die alone in this world.
Be happy that whether you live or die, you will always have something that only belongs to you:
Yourself.
Wrapping up
As a kid in my mid-20s, I am surrounded by my hustling friends and loved ones.
‘We need to earn more’
I always ask them for what, and ‘hona chahiye’ is their answer.
Although I have been depressed this past year for the same reason.
But there is something I always noticed.
The rich seem the same sad, lonely and desperate the poor do.
Then what is the point of them earning more?
I realised around 3-4 months earlier that both are two different statues made out of the same mud, one made to look pretty and other quite sad.
Life is our carver, and when we get too disbalanced, life the artisan takes the liberty of destroying and remaking us.
Something we puny humans call growth, or at least the opportunity for it.
It just hit me yesterday that I am meant to earn and earn lots, my partner once told me how he thinks I will earn much more than he ever can.
But in the Rancho run-after-perfection style, the Chatur style is not for idiots like me.
Maybe its so easy for me to dismiss money as an indicator of life quality because of this strangely-enduring confidence in me about my earning ability.
I don’t where you are reading this from, dear reader, but know that I wish and hope and pray the best for you and your efforts.
I hope that you build what you need, give away what you don’t and keep reading my words and supporting me with your smiles :)
Originally published on Substack. View Discussion on Substack →
