I’m a poor man's poor man. That’s how broke I am. And going
by the recent Zoroastrian ramifications in the city, I'm too poor to be a poor
Parsi, either. It’s also one of the reasons I don’t have superrich friends. I’d love to call
myself a poor writer as well but that would be farcical due to my commitments
towards amphigory. But to your credit, there is no such thing called a poor
man's Chetan Bhagat. He’s just another former rotund banker who is molesting his
thin luck. To that measure, even in the world of literature, the ugly gap
between rich and poor is not only widening but also dividening.
Ask yourself: Isn’t
it a remarkable coincidence that almost all the famous writers come from an
affluent background? And all these moneyed snobs carry the divine right to comment
on our miserable underbelly?
Having trolled them, I can assure myself we are only as wretched
as our hindsight. But that doesn’t make the world balanced. Everything depends
on how we choose to look at things. In that sense, not all beggars are poor nor
all poor, beggars. Giving is something and asking is something else. For example,
the underprivilged ones keep dreaming of orchestrating a real revolution while the
rich are quite content with trending topics on Twitter.
Anyway, there's something terribly wrong with a world where
the rich insure their butt while the poor get theirs kicked. But in the middle
lies the middle class (MC)—the poor who can afford to spend. And this class
tends to believe that those battling poverty and geezerhood are having a lot of
time on their hand (and finger) as they queue out there under the scorning sun just
to cast their vote. To sum it up, their life is a lame political trick gone
funny.
Politics makes its presence felt when a grimy nation like India
test-fires missiles and related phallic inanities hoping she wouldn’t be as
poor as she already is. A similar trend is visible during those time of the
year when budget is announced. The media automatically drifts towards MC. What the
clowns in Parliament fail to understand is the fact that the poor don't need a
budget. For that, all they've got to do is insert their hands into their
pockets. They need clothes with pockets, in most cases, to be blunt.
Similarly, health is wealth when it comes to those who never
heard anybody share the secret of an apple’s ability to scare away doctors. These
lot die in huge numbers. Every single day. Without a sound. While doing so, they
prove the rich man's disease a myth. After all, it’s just that the poor couldn’t
afford to diagnose what they actually died from.
There’s nothing wrong with being poor. But if you aren’t
rich, at least try to be happy. Also, those who are poor thanks to their rich
principles are indeed rich.
