I’ve already explored questions such as what it is to be a good person, and once defined, why anyone would want to become one. Entire religions, cults, and societies have been formed upon these questions and Alfred Doolittle’s five-minute stage time answers them all so elegantly.

Countless Matrix fans are already familiar with the concept of control in society. Whether real or not, we live in a world with psychological barriers meant to control us. Religions, customs, traditions, social acceptance are all imposed by a few upon the masses in an effort to contain them and control them. Generally speaking a selfish person is good for society. I know this sounds a bit counter intuitive, but really think about it. So long as a person is trapped in the selfish loops of their lives, they are harmless. They may be irritable and frustrated, but they are generally so involved in their own little world that they can be manipulated quite easily. Just imagine what would happen if majority of the population had their lives as relatively easy as people in my situation do – bills get autodebited, household stuff happens on autopilot, and get lots of free time on their hands – it’s a nightmare for the ruling classes – all of a sudden people would have loads of time and energy to demand better roads, better governance, and so on – in short people would become selfless.

And yet, due to industrialization and globalization, that’s exactly what did happen – in Europe and America a century ago, and in India over the last decade. The majority of the world’s population now lives in cities. Most services are provided by private companies – meaning better customer care and relatively easier lives for the masses (anyone remember the days when the government had a monopoly on telecommunications?) That can’t be good – people suddenly start caring about shit like “Human Rights”, “Budget Allocations”, “Corruption”, and all that kinda stuff. These aren’t people you can push over, because they’re the so-called ‘working class’ who use the word ‘deserve’ a lot more than is comfortable. These people work hard, and hence they deserve certain things and won’t back down until they get them. These people are in a majority too. These people also believe in notions like “self-respect” and “honour” and “dignity” – so long as these adjectives are applied to them by others.

Enter “Middle Class Morality”. In almost every speech by politians, business tycoons and generally anyone else, we hear the middle classes praised in one form or another – usually with the same adjectives above – self-respect, honour, dignitiy, hard-workers, etc. By creating a society where such adjectives need to be applied by “others”, you create a perfect selfishness loop for people to be involved in and keep busy. Now everyone is trying to gratify themselves by trying to get as many of their peers to apply those adjectives to them, while the peers are also engaged in the converse process. By tying these virtues with morality, you have a perfect weapon for manipulation.

As time progresses, whatever problems, issues or squabbles the middle class may have, can be squished with morality – whatever you don’t want them to do, just define it as being things that “bad people do” and you’re all done. Once the middle classes start judging each other’s nobility and self-respect and all that crap based on your definition of what bad people are, you’ll find not one of them will dare have any of their own kind call them “less dignified”. A system of perfect control. Of course, not all morality can be attributed to control – most of it is just plain stupidity. Once you have notions of “more dignified” or “less dignified” (don’t we just love comparisons?), the middle class starts inventing their own definitions and standards to be somehow “more moral” than their peers, who are trying to do the same.

Over time, we find ourselves in a society with a majority so selfish and self-absorbed in non-issues that the minority are left to do what they want and rule the world. I know it’s ironic, but morality is the biggest evil our society could face today. We all live under illusions of being “good people” and “moral people”.

Before ending I will say that to want to be moral and good isn’t wrong, which is why such manipulation is dangerous and requires almost Jedi-like calmness to prevent. It’s very difficult, but equally important, to be able to judge what really is righteous and moral behaviour, as opposed to what is simply being imposed as a system of control.

Hear me out before you flame. I do admit that most Indians are poor and desperate. They have no hope for a better life in the near future. They have no opportunities for education (no, this is not going to turn into one of my pro-reservation rants). They have no opportunities for any respect or better treatment. And I have all the sympathy for them. Now that I’ve put in this rather detailed disclaimer, these aren’t the people I’m talking about (and neither was Bernard Shaw.)

Poverty , for those who don’t have to face it, is full of romanticism and nobility. It somehow propels the most worthless loser on earth to some kind of holy self-less Jedi-Knight level (perhaps the same way I claim to want to be a Jedi so long as I don’t have to endure their hardships daily). No, this isn’t the typical “be happy with what you have because there are people poorer than you” crap either! And for the record – I hate that kinda crap.

This is about how we choose poverty to escape responsibility and accountability. This is about how we use poverty as an excuse to do what we want while feigning helplessness. This is about transforming poverty into a heroic virtue, and pretending it has been chosen to avoid the struggle to escape it.

Let me begin by a controversial claim, and one that gets most of my friends mad when I make it – India has never really faced severe hardship due to natural causes and that this has made us a very complacent society. We have natural resources, tropical climate where plenty of food is available, temperate climate, and a rich forest. Alright alright, so we need people to actually go and farm, but there’s not been much to complain of naturally. It’s not like we were in the middle of a desert, or a place that’s buried in snow half the year. There have been places that faced inevitable hardships and problems – where people had to work together to avoid extinction, not just inconvenience. Indians on the other hand have always faced artificial hardships – 99% of them caused by the then-rulers, whoever they may be. In other cultures, there would be mass revolts, but we just keep on whining and do nothing. And the reason, in my opinion, is plain and simple – there really is nothing we faced more than a minor inconvenience. If someone goes into examples of farmers in Maharashtra committing suicide – they’ll be proving my point – a few deaths really don’t matter to us, which is why we’re so complacent and smug to discuss this in civilized society to appear concerned but do nothing beyond that. Those farmers dying is, at best, a minor inconvenience for the rest of us because now we need to appear to be concerned in our next social outing and waste a few moments talking about it.

The effects of this complacency are seen throughout our culture – we’ve always idolized artificial challenges – our great Sadhus fasted for a thousand years which makes sense in a society where food was plentiful. The same would be called idiots in places where the daily survival was to find food to get through that day, and instead their heroes would be those who struggled to gather food and perhaps feed a couple of mouths more. Whenever someone talks about problems in India, we snap back, “We invented the zero.” A phrase that makes me proud of whoever invented the zero a thousand years ago, and then equally ashamed of the 200 generations in between who didn’t use it until the Europeans told us to (if you’ve read my previous entries you’ll know the one thing I demand above all is responsibility and accountability – if we’re responsible for inventing the zero, we’re accountable for not having used it.) Here again, we find that being able to do tabular arithmetic due to the decimal system was valuable where resources were scant and they needed to be managed efficiently. Let’s face it, India’s illiteracy is as much voluntary as it is due to circumstances. I’ve lived in a rural village all my childhood and people looked down upon us “educated”-types who were thought to be wasting their lives by studying. Here again we see that education is really a previledge and not a necessity.

I’ll come to the point now – is poverty a choice we’ve made to allow us to be lazy, and complacent and irresponsible and unaccountable? I’ll leave that as an open question for you and will give some points to think about.

India is not a poor country by any means. Poor countries demonstrate need. The US is a poor country – I feel sorry for them. They have problems like the recession, and they discuss those problems, they face them, and they ask for help. They take steps to fix the problems. That’s the evidence of being poor. If you’re wondering whether Indians discuss and face these problems or whether we live in denial, you’ll get your answer in the responses to this post. We have 3% population that pays income tax, and those 3% are called “stupid” for not being able to evade taxes – what’s worse is that those 3% are also the ones who lose out in every red-taped procedure. Those 3% rich people offset the costs for servicing the “poor people” with black money who get instant services (I would be happy to arrange a demonstration for the skeptics, at their leisure.) Meaning, those 3% like me are stinking rich who’ve supporting our poor below-poverty-line minsters who can’t make a decent living.

We go around claiming we’re a “poor country” and hence don’t have money for academic research (or any research for that matter.) Look closely though and you find that it’s a choice we’ve made. I don’t blame us for not wanting to do it – research is hard and thankless work, but have the guts to say we’re lazy. Don’t blame it on lack of resources.

One of the most visible (and admittedly not very critical) examples is IIT Mumbai’s is sky bridge in their gents’ hostel. Sure, it looks impressive, but playing table-tennis on a sky-bridge 100-feel-high, in my opinion (the great IIT scientists may disagree), adds no academic value to the country whatsoever. That money could have funded thousands of research projects in thousands of institutions all over the country. A “poor” society, is by definition, a utilitarian one. It is supposed to divert every single resource to satisfy a “need” before allocating them to a “nice-to-have” feature. Isn’t this the same institution that claims they don’t get enough teachers

On a larger scale, the entire educational system is filled with reservations – no, not for the lower-castes, for the institutions. We fund Rs. 700 crore per-year-per-IIM, and Rs. 500 crore per-year-per-IIT – in the same breath we are proud of all pass-outs being hired outside the country. This is reservation – a non-competitive market – if you’re in the “IIM” caste, you’re given a free ride. A grant without accountability and without responsibility. (This isn’t an anti-IIM rant but those are the big numbers – there are hundreds of universities/colleges the government funds without any accountability whatsoever.) If the UGC instead declared that every year they’ll allocate this 700 crore to any management institution based on a competitive criteria – heck I’ll allow the IIMs to define that criteria – but once defined, it should be immutable. Let other institutions in the game – let the IIMs have the possibility of losing those funds for one year. If they’re so good, they won’t mind. In a “poor country” funds are competitively allocated where they bring back maximum benefit. Still want to claim we’re poor?

All in all, we as a society, have turned into whiners. Poverty allows us to escape/justify whatever faults people find in us. Can’t do research? We’re poor. Can’t pay taxes? Taxes are for the rich, even our ministers are on welfare here.

Can anyone deny that poverty is the biggest crime we’re all guilty of?