It is curious to note that when we speak of greedy people , we immediately have images of pot-bellied politicians and industrialists with bikiniclad babes by their side. Never a filmstar who keeps working and working and working and working, making crores for every day of work. Or a sportsperson who keeps playing and endorsing and playing and endorsing and endorsing and endorsing and still demanding tax exemptions for his gifts. No, the filmstar and sportsmen are just honest hardworking people who are exploiting no one: surely they cannot be classified as greedy.
This is where the confusion starts. We confuse greed with exploitation and corruption . Greed is seeking more than you need. Exploitation and corruption are simply means to get what you seek. It is possible to be honest and upright and hardworking and diligent and pay your taxes on time and never exploit or abuse or be corrupt, and still be greedy. Very very greedy.
Notice how every advertisement and every brand is hogged by just dozen or so superstars from Bollywood and cricket. Their combined income of these 12 people will be quite enough to feed several villages for several years. But we do not see this as greed, perhaps because some of them make programs about the poor and the dispossessed and the exploited, and often appear in charitable events, for a fee of course, to tell the world they should be socially responsible.
As we become increasingly Westernized, we believe that rules and rationality will solve the problems. Hence we hold conferences on corporate responsibility and ethics and governance, hoping that the law will make the greedy (once we identify them) make sense. I am sure every Bollywood star and cricketer has not broken a single of these laws. They may run people down on the streets, they may kill endangered wild life, they may keep illegal weapons at home, they have alleged strange bedroom habits, but they remain ethical and lawabiding citizens in our eyes, and we are eager to forgive them. Why? Because they entertain us. Not the politicians , who seem to be making our lives miserable.
The sages of India did not believe that any law or punishment can stop the greedy from being greedy. They saw it as a deeper emotional problem , as the following story reveals. It's a story we have all heard, but we rarely decode.
Kubera, the king of Yakshas , pot-bellied treasurer of the gods once paid a visit to Kailas, the abode of Shiva, the hermit-god , where he met Shiva's elephant-headed son, the corpulent Ganesha. Kubera thought to himself, "Ganesha clearly loves food and Shiva can clearly not afford to feed him to his heart's content." So as a favor to Shiva, Kubera offered to feed Ganesha one meal. When Ganesha accepted the invitation and entered Kubera's kitchen, the Yaksha-king said, "Eat to your heart's content ." Kubera regretted these words. Ganesha's appetite was insatiable. He ate everything that was in the kitchen and still asked for more. Food had to be bought from the larder and then from the market . But Ganesha was still hungry. "More please," he said raising his trunk. Kubera had to spend all the money in his treasury and buy all the food in the world to feed Ganesha but still Ganesha was not happy. Finally , Kubera fell at Ganesha's feet and begged him to stop, "I don't have enough food to satisfy your hunger. Forgive me."
To this Ganesha said, "You really think food will satisfy hunger! The difference between you and my father is that you seek to provide more food while he seeks to reduce hunger. That is why I sit in his house and not in your kitchen."
The point here is not the humbling of Kubera by Ganesha , but the idea of Shiva, the idea of outgrowing hunger that liberates us from the desire to hoard. We cannot stop hoarding until we appreciate why we hoard? We hoard in fear. And fear is the most primal of human emotions. In fact, fear came to this world before death. It is the emotion that propels all animals to fight for their survival.
Fear has been around for three billion years; humans have been around for less than a million. And with humans comes imagination: which means our fear is amplified by imagination. And that fear amplifies our hunger . We hoard and we hoard to protect us from future poverty . Remember how one Bollywood star keeps reminding us that he works like a maniac and continues to make zillions because once he experienced bankruptcy. He cannot get rid of that baggage ; thus he rationalizes greed and we all sob at his well-rehearsed story.
We live in a world where we are admired for what we have: more marks, more salary , more income, more houses , more cars, more mobiles, more muscles, more hits, less fat, less wrinkles. We celebrate the ghastly film because it makes over 100 crores. We celebrate the star with the maximum endorsements under his belt. In other words, we reward greed constantly . Every time we draw up the list of the 'richest people in the world' we are actually celebrating greed. We are telling the next generation what matters in life: have more and more and more. Thus we ourselves are creating the benchmarks of the new social pecking order. And when someone does build a tall Babel of a house on the hill, we cry foul.
Pattanaik, an author, illustrator , speaker, mythologist , leadership coach and Chief Belief Officer of Future group, will be speaking at The Times of India Literary Carnival on December 8 in a session titled 'Mythology as Powerpoint' and on December 9 in a session titled 'Our Ram, Their Achilles' where he will moderate two classics experts Arshia Sattar and Madeline Miller, winner of this year's Orange Prize for Fiction.
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