Place of Birth and especially the Place of Death are often neglected areas of macabre research. On the subject, the Philadelphia-born comedian W.C.Fields' cheeky yet candid suggestion for his own tombstone epitaph reads:
"Here lies W. C. Fields. I would rather be living in Philadelphia."
The decade old Microsoft X-Box 'Life is Short, Play More' advertisement (above) captures the trite 'Life is a Journey' expression literally. The emphasis is inadvertently not on on the actual elaborate scalar distance covered but the vector-geometric concept of displacement - the effective spatial journey covered in life to 'eternal rest'.
On
page 8 of today's Time of India (Hyderabad version), an obituary
message declared yet another beloved dog's passing away a year ago. The
owners/family came out with not just the Date of Birth and Death of
Death but also quite uniquely - the places of these events. Unlike the
more popular human destination of Heaven and the significantly
less trendy Hell, dogs apparently prefer a different place of 'Eternal
Rest' - Hyderabad!
Selling insurance is a strange proposition. In a month, I have sold around 600 accident insurance policies. I have a standard pitch that rolls out like a tape. And then there is a more persuasive/ aggressive pitch. If the prospective customer is still not convinced, then I usually say something like "...if Rs.100 is too high for annual accident insurance cover for you, then put your faith in God!"
Like everyday, I had yet another customer walk-in asking about the 'four lakh insurance'. Once the customer is willing, its a short routine for me. I make a mental calculation of their age, since the policy only applies to people between the ages of 18 and 65 years. Then I am required to ask the line of work the client is engaged in, since police and armed forces are excluded.
So once again I do my usual assessing and ask this particular forty-something thin bearded individual the same "what do you do?" question.
He replies "I am a pastor."
I start to smirk and asked where his church was. He answered.
In about five minutes he was insured against accidental death, permanent total disablement and permanent partial disablement and temporary total disablement. I handed his policy to him.
Before he got up to leave, I couldn't help myself so I told him that I sometimes promote this insurance policy by comparing it favorably against faith in God and that in his case I couldn't do that.
In an unflustered manner, he said "But it is only Rs.100!"
I quickly added "..and it has been extremely popular with the customers..."
A few weeks ago during the ongoing US Presidential election campaign, President Barack Obama made a speech where he controversially used the words "You didn't build that" in reference to how individual wealth creation is dependent on social institutions and structures. The soundbites of the speech were relayed on the news networks and on the internet (below):
The immediate para of the "You didn't build that" part of the speech was:
"If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some
help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody
helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that
allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If
you’ve got a business -- you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that
happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government
research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money
off the Internet."
-US President Barack Obama
Something about this speech felt familiar. Deja vu perhaps? Then the speech faded from memory.
During this morning's journey to work, I heard words that brought this speech back to mind. I was listening to one of my brother's music CDs when an old telugu song came on. This song too talks of the futility of self-absorption and calls for the realization of the organic nature of human existence within the social framework. The song was from the telugu movie "Rudraveena" called "Chuttu Pakkala Choodara Chinnavada" ("Look Around Little One") written by Sirivennela Sitaramasastri.
The last stanza of the song roughly translates to:
Every grain you eat, was produced by this community
The life in which you take pride, was shaped by this society
When the time comes to repay your debt, are you fleeing?
Will you burn the boat, after you've crossed the stream?
Both the song and the speech have a socialist tone. In the song this message is contrasted against a mystical and spiritual understanding of human existence. While the same message is used by Obama to counter an existential interpretation of free-market individualism. Put together, these interpretation have sought to project socialism as a beacon to refute both the atheistic & worldly as well as the religious & other-worldly interpretations of human existence.
But in this effort to glorify socialism in poetry and prose, one aspect that remains unanswered is the extent to which collectivism is an end as opposed to it merely being the means. This element of vanity within socialism was captured by the comedian John Foster Hall in his often quoted pithy one-liner:
"We are all here on earth to help others;
what on earth the others are here for, I don’t know"
Business transactions take place because the parties involved agree to act in good faith. This is an essential requirement for trade just as it is for most other human interactions. Placing faith in another is an endeavour that is fraught with perils. But that is the price of trust.
To emphasis India's approach policy toward Pakistan, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh often repeats former US President Ronald Reagan's Soviet-directed phrase - "Trust, but verify" . The phrase actually brings out the inherent vulnerability in the whole exercise of engaging 'the other'. The insurance industry actually factors this feeling of 'being taken for a ride' in calculating the Moral Hazard in a transaction.
This jeweller's ad on the back of a bus picks up on this notion of trust. It reads -
"Our Gold is as Pure as your Trust".
Thus placing the onus of the quality of their product on the customer's belief. The statement works just as well when the word 'Gold' is replaced by 'God'. All the religions willfully put their followers in that position of having to conduct their own self-appraisals in order to enjoy the benefits of their faith. Here, suspension of disbelief has to always occur first at the individual level.
The larger irony in the advertisement's message though is that while the benchmarking of gold itself as a metal of value to humans is an exercise in trust, still within that taken-for-granted trust - doubt persists on the details. And hence the phrase "Trust, but verify".
