MUST GREED BE YOUR GOD, O MAN?

Character is a quality in absence today among businessmen in the bulk and I include here all those who are making money at the cost of the disadvantaged position of the consumer or the client or the patient or the student to fill up their own coffers without caring even once to ponder the hapless condition of these thereby. Doctors charge inordinately high fees for treatment and for operations. Lawyers reduce clients to penury when litigation lingers long. Public schools, colleges and universities charge tuition fees post-admission and capitation fees for admission quite beyond the paying capacity of ordinary people though they may deserve to study there by dint of merit. And what to speak of businessmen enmasse? They have lost their morality and are mere slaves to the third vice of the human system, greed. Capitalism for all its pretensions is fuelled by greed and charity of the rich is the biggest eye-wash of all for, oftener than not, one is charitable only when one has earlier siphoned money out of the economic system by foul play of prohibitive profit-making in the name of law-abiding business and about that, too, there are significant causes for worry, for who does not know that tycoons hoard wealth by not merely ‘fair’ means permitted by law?

Law. Whose law? The law of the land? The people’s law? The law that looks after the well-being of all? Or the law that caters to the accumulation of wealth for a few at the expense of the life-blood of the many? The Father of the Nation had rebelled against the inequities of British Indian law and had staged the Civil Disobedience Movement. The British have gone. We are a free nation. Then why are these extreme inequities of wealth being allowed to proliferate in the name of national development? After all, whose development are we talking of? The masses? Their condition is growing worse by the day as prices of commodities soar and they must perforce be purchased still for sheer survival necessity. Add to it the constant brainwashing done by advertisement of all sorts to induce desire into the human system for acquisition of commodities not necessarily a necessity for living but an imperative after the signal sent into the nervous system grips the desirous mind of the hapless potential consumer. This rapacious capitalism is ruining the character of humankind across the globe and reducing man to an economic animal. It has greed, I reiterate, as its fuelling force and basis, and, gluttonous acquisition of unlawful and ‘lawful’ wealth as its goal. This worship of Mammon cannot but spell the doom for human civilisation at no distant a date and, therefore, it is time to retrace our steps and return to the path of righteous living founded on the principles of ethics and morality, of spirituality and virtue. Only then may we call ourselves ‘human beings’ when our lives are governed principally by humanistic impulses. Till then we are no better than savages that feast on each other impelled by cannibalistic impulses. Watch out, O you mercenaries among men, you insensitive souls who have strayed from the path of God and righteousness. Return to God. Return to Man.