Intellectual Prostitutes - Aha

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The Great Dollar Story

Sometime back I had read about a prince who was out to find his destiny, and met a holy man (the matted hair, bearded, saffron clad, stick surmounted, beneath a huge tree........ meditating sorts) who was in dire need of water. Our prince obliged and was granted a boon, where he could change into any form. The prince asked to be changed into a drop of water (don’t know why the water and that too only a drop !).

Anyways he was granted.

Ding! The drop of water prince was sucked through the roots of the tree, moved within the thick branch , converted to a glistening drop on the leaf, and dripped down to the holy mans sight only to be changed back to his original princely form. Enlightened the prince thanks the holy man and walks away

Well, what was the enlightenment? The moral what goes in comes back out.

And where is the dollar in all of this, you must be thinking.

Now the dollar was a source of tension for Rob (our good old CEO of ABC Inc - A couple of decade old All American Company), and Bob (his wily manager).Rob was worried on how to jack up his companies profit without spending a damm penny on productivity enhancements, training and development and of course without spending any money on business enhancements. (read margin driven top lines)

Bob his wily manager coined the magic solution – Outsourcing.

He sold it as” the act of transferring the non core activities of our businesses to competent third party firms, thus allowing us to focus on core competencies which can help us build a sustainable advantage”

Rob lost his patience and yelled” this isn’t a fancy presentation in your Harvard; this is the real world, cut down the jazz and tell me in simple terms”

Bob, jostled back to reality walks to the board and writes down: -

1. Data management and processing - $ 12 = $5/hr
2. Software Services - $30 = $15/hr
3. Financial - $ 180 = $80/hr

Rob's mind whirred at all those dollars pouring in. How this magic happens, he asked thoughtfully?

Bob said, we can send all this work to India and pay them some dollars. This would be more money than those brown skinned guys would have ever made in their life, they would jump at it. (No doubt about it, even I jumped at it, now I want to run out of it !!)

But if we give them all those dollars, wont they save it all, and eventually we would not have any dollars, Asians are famous at being cheap.


They are cheap only when they come to the US of A sir, at home they suffer from the S –syndrome.

They would spend all of it Levi jeans – the all American symbol, Reebok, Nike and the list is endless.

Rob was still not convinced, eventually Indians (they are smart,  no doubt about it) would realize this con game and their currency would almost have the same power as dollars.

You forget sir, power eventually flows out of the barrel of a gun, and our guns are bigger than theirs. Any attempt at increasing their power in terms of fixing their currency (remember the Chinese forced to float the Yuan), would be met with “global pressure to allow free market forces to shape the market”.

Note – I am not anti American, or pro – communist, I am just seeing the way the dollar/Euro flows.I do hope, though that the new rupee symbol does some magic !!

The "S" Effect - Must be the Genes !

The newspapers all around are screaming of the admitted tragedy that has been accorded to the Bhopal gas victims. The comparison of the hefty damage of 20 billion which has been wrested off by US from the oil giant BP stands in stark comparison to the 450 million given off to the dead and the injured in Bhopal. Just to put things in perspective the cost of an Indian life is just 2% the cost of US ecosystem and its nature.

While we are screaming for Andersons head, and asking for his extradition, the question that arises is why and how this has happened? Congress in its press statement , and politcs playing has called the entire episode a “systemic failure”.

Nopes, it is not a systemic failure. The real reason, which may be unpalatable to some, is the fact that we have still not outgrown our colonial mentality. We see ourselves subservient to the white skinned. I think it is the remnant of 200 years of subjugation and that has tossed out a genetic trait as such.

Don’t believe me? Ever walk into a restaurant and look at the treatment accorded to a foreigner who is white skinned. You would say that the guy is merely doing it for his tips. True to a certain extent, but if the same foreigner is a black, American or otherwise the treatment meted out is the same or in some cases worse off than to normal citizens.

At this point my roommates interject and toss out a rather interesting reason for our behavior as such.” They are more beautiful than us, and it is human nature to be appreciative of beauty and acknowledge it. Have you ever seen a foreigner who is having misshapen features? “

I chuckle inwardly at their attempts to justify their behavior. Admittedly white people are better endowed anatomically, but they are not really beautiful. Pretty, maybe but beauty no.

And again we are not appreciative of prettiness, we are appreciative of structure. I am reminded of an experiment which showed pictures of various pretty people to toddlers and recorded their response.

Denzel Washington scored the highest among all the beautiful people!

This led to the conclusion that symmetry is what we involuntary look for in people. Washington’s features align perfectly. That is to say that if your were to cut his face into 2 halves with a vertical line across his forehead and nose, and put one over the other they would overlap perfectly.

So the next time you come across a white skinned person and find yourselves being, well “appreciative of beauty “ you may want to take refuge in the fact that it isn’t you, it is your genes, which is called the slavery or the " S "gene.