Money

Jeff Crowther said, "Some one really lazy would have created money".  He was correct.  Money serves a dual purpose of being a unit of value and also a medium of exchange.  Before money was invented the rice dealer would have struggled to exchange his goods to, say, buy clothes or utensils.  Barter would have been a huge issue for society and some lazy person, who had all this time in the world, would have been thinking how to resolve the problem and would have come up with the concept of money.  Once money was created, kings started wondering how to physically make this money without being in a situation where everyone created this money. Hence, gold was used.  Over a period of time, gold gave way to silver, then came alloys of cheaper metals and now paper.

Man tends to over extend everything in life. Our greatest strengths, when over extended, become our greatest weaknesses.  We end up losing whatever we thought we would get out of these strengths.  To reduce problems in society being able to access everything it needed in life, we created money.  Slowly, greed took over and since we wanted everything that this society had to offer, we started trying to make more of this money.  We hoarded money and when we did that, we started robbing from each other.  When we started robbing from each other, we started keeping them in safe locations.  These safe locations, over a period of time, became banks and these trusted people became bankers.  Banking, grew over the years, and used this money to lend to those who needed this money.  So, money started circulating around.  It could do much more than what it was originally created for.  Thousands of years after money was created, in 2008, we saw one of the biggest crisis take place with millions of people being displaced from their homes, lose jobs, commit suicide, etc. and all this happened all across the world.  We called it the Global Financial Crisis.  Our solution to resolve the barter problem landed us in one of the worst crisis that we experienced. 

As Santosh was about to step in to the cab, I asked him, "Santosh, would you be willing to leave Rs.25,000 in this cab and go out shopping for an hour without worrying that it will be stolen either by the cabbie or someone else?"  He said that there is no question of trusting a cabbie who he did not know with Rs.25,000.  I asked him as to how does he trust the cabbie with his life by getting in to it and taking an one hour ride back home?  What if the cabbie drove rashly resulting in a fatal accident?

We go through life without thinking through so many things.  Money, they say, is the reason for most of the ills of mankind.  I have to disagree.  We have only ourselves to blame.  Money has never asked us to over-extend its use.  It has never asked us to become greedy.  We have become greedy.  As the actor Rajnikanth says, "So long as we have adequate quantities of money, it will protect us.  Once we stock excess quantities, we have to protect it."

I read two snippets of news that actually shows the power of money. One was about a very rich businessman selling some of his equity holdings to contribute a significant amount to his foundation that focusses on education.  Education to millions of Indians will result in a stronger India in the future and is clearly the only way out for Indians to come out of poverty.

The other snippet was about a wayward son who had gone in to drugs.  After his parents died, he realised that they had willed away all their money to a charity.  Left without any money, he is now living in a charity home outside of Bangalore.  He now realises that his misuse of money and his disrespect for it is what has resulted in the lousy situation that he finds himself in today.  Money seems to have taught this young man a real tough lesson in life.

In India, we worship the Goddess Lakshmi and many say that we do that so that we can get more wealth.  What our ancestors wanted us was to respect money and so created this Goddess of Wealth, Lakshmi.  This would ensure that we give money the due respect and treat it well so that it helps us.  Clearly, our ancestors seem to have known more than us...wish we learn from the lessons they have taught us and find peace with our lives!!!

True happiness seems to be in sharing the wealth that we have with others than in hoarding it.  There is the story of a very rich farmer in the US who sprayed not only his farm but also the ones of his not so wealthy neighbours.  He did this for 2 years till his neighbours became rich enough to afford spraying themselves.  But, what this did for him was that his farm started yielding more and he made more money because he had rid himself of the problem of insects coming in from the unsprayed neighbouring farms.  This example is true for us in all aspects of life.  The more we share, the more we end up getting!!!