Bury two

A lawyer was accosted by his colleagues and asked to subscribe ten pounds (dollars?) to arranging the funeral of a fellow professional. He at once fished out some money from his pocket and exclaimed, 'Is it that cheap to bury a lawyer? Here's twenty pounds: go ahead and bury two!'

Some ascribe this mordant (and self-mocking) witticism to the great Irish legal luminary John Philpot Curran; others to someone equally likely, Abraham Lincoln himself. The only other famous (ex-) lawyer I know of who spoke about his professional brothers in the same vein was Mohandas Gandhi.

Knowing the teaching profession as I do, I daresay that in a similar situation, I'd probably come up with the same remark, despite knowing it won't be original...

The things that matter

I heard this doggerel in Bangla when I was still a boy, and like so many other things that seemed really interesting at first blush, it has stuck permanently in my memory.  Hari hey, dinobondhu, tumi amar babar bondhu/ hoy tumi dyakha dao, noy kichhu poysha dao,  the country poet says: “Lord, you are my dad’s old friend, y’know/ show yourself to me, or do give me some dough”.

Having lived and seen and thought a long time, I marvel at how this anonymous philosopher got his priorities just right, and with what sublime simplicity he has expressed them.

If you see God, you’ve got everything. Till then, it’s best to have some money.

It’s like the wag said about the American credo: In God we trust. With everyone else, we prefer cash…

Want to get rich quick? Avoid college

The British businessman Simon Dolan has written in this month’s issue of Reader’s Digest that if you want to make good money, going for ‘higher education’ would probably be a costly waste of time. Doctors and lawyers need college degrees; those who want to make it big in business don’t – certainly not fancy management degrees which cost the earth and teach you little about how to make money in the real world. Dolan’s words should count: he’s worth a hundred million pounds himself, and has drawn attention to other hugely successful college dropouts like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and Richard Branson.

We in India could draw up a goodly list ourselves, I guess, with Dhirubhai Ambani right there at the top. So these are my views exactly. You want to make real money (and don’t tell me doctors and engineers make serious money!), trust on native intelligence, hard work, willingness to take big risks and learn from experience – and get into business as soon as you leave high school. If you are even moderately lucky, all your doctor and engineer friends will be envying you by the time you are 35, and maybe asking you to give them jobs.

If, on the other hand, you belong to the (vanishingly small-) tribe of people who value learning for its own sake, because next to doing good to your fellow man it is the grandest pursuit, don’t let thoughts of how much money you are going to make deter you from studying whatever you really love, whether it is history or physics or some fine art. Go for it.

And God have mercy on your doctor and engineer friends, who will miss out on both counts in the end, neither making much money nor finding out how much fun life can offer to the bold and fancy-free...

masterji, my kid's getting married, please come!

Why do the parents of ex-students who have never once contacted me for years after they left my classes come over to invite me to their children's weddings, and actually expect me to honour the invitation? Can anybody tell me? I should so like to know.