How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia
von Mohsin Hamid
In the months that follow, you receive anonymous death threats and meet with politicians you thought were allies but prove barely able to conceal their gloating. You are caught up in one of the cynical accountability campaigns periodically launched by your city’s establishment, tossed to the wolf pack of public opinion, unsubstantiated rumors of your shady dealings receiving scandalized attention in newspapers. You have always been an outsider, and finally you have been wounded. It is only natural that you be sacrificed so that the rest of the herd may prance on. Because as far as getting rich is concerned, love can be an impediment. Yes, the pursuit of love and the pursuit of wealth have much in common. Both have the potential to inspire, motivate, uplift, and kill. But whereas achieving a massive bank balance demonstrably attracts fine physical specimens desperate to give their love in exchange, achieving love tends to do the opposite. It dampens the fire in the steam furnace of ambition, robbing of essential propulsion an already fraught upriver journey to the heart of financial success.
Many skills, as every successful entrepreneur knows, cannot be taught in school. They require doing. Sometimes a lifetime of doing. And where moneymaking is concerned, nothing compresses the time frame needed to leap from my-shit-just-sits-there-until-it-rains poverty to which-of-my-toilets-shall-I-use affluence like an apprenticeship with someone who already has the angles all figured out.
Your motivations stem from different sources, from lingering desires to connect and to be of use, from the need to fill a few of the long hours of the week, and from curiosity about the world beyond, about the comings and goings and toings and froings of that great city outside your hotel, in which you have passed almost the entirety of your life, and of which you once knew so much.
Getting an education is a running leap towards becoming filthy rich in rising Asia. This is no secret. But like many desirable things, simply being well known does not make it easily achieved. There are forks in the road to wealth that have nothing to do with choice or desire or effort, forks that have to do with chance, and in your case, the order of your birth is one of these.
With borrowed funds, a business can invest, gain leverage, and leverage is a pair of wings. Leverage is flight. Leverage is a way for small to be big and big to be huge, a glorious abstraction, the promise of tomorrow today, yes, a liberation from time, the resounding triumph of human will over dreary, chronology-shackled physical reality. To leverage is to be immortal.
Your mother is quiet throughout, as she tends to be in her interactions with medical professionals. They are unusual in their capacity to cause this behavior in her. Their power to kill in the future by uttering mysterious words today robs her of her confidence and she, a customarily confident woman, resents this. She longs to resist them but has no idea how to do so.
"In the months that follow, you receive anonymous death threats and meet with politicians you thought were allies but prove barely able to conceal their gloating. You are caught up in one of the cynical accountability campaigns periodically launched by your city’s establishment, tossed to the wolf pack of public opinion, unsubstantiated rumors of your shady dealings receiving scandalized attention in newspapers. You have always been an outsider, and finally you have been wounded. It is only natural that you be sacrificed so that the rest of the herd may prance on."
"Because as far as getting rich is concerned, love can be an impediment. Yes, the pursuit of love and the pursuit of wealth have much in common. Both have the potential to inspire, motivate, uplift, and kill. But whereas achieving a massive bank balance demonstrably attracts fine physical specimens desperate to give their love in exchange, achieving love tends to do the opposite. It dampens the fire in the steam furnace of ambition, robbing of essential propulsion an already fraught upriver journey to the heart of financial success."
"Meanwhile similar attempts, both official and non, seem to be under way to try to desiccate society itself, through among other things creeping restrictions on festivals and the public pursuit of fun, with a similar result, cracks, those widening fissures evident between young people, who appear to you divided as never before, split into myriad, incomprehensible tribes, signaling their affiliations with an automobile sticker, a bare shoulder, or some arcane permutation in the possibilities for facial hair."
"Indeed she does. As with the sun, you have always found it difficult to gaze upon her directly, but tonight you control your instinct to glance away, attempting instead to balance on that crumbly ledge between staring and shiftiness. What you see is a woman little changed by the years, not, obviously, because this is true, your first meeting having been half your lifetimes ago, but rather because your image of her is not entirely determined by her physical reality."
"At each subsequent wonder you think you have arrived, that surely nothing could belong more to your destination than this, and each time you are proven wrong until you cease thinking and simply surrender to the layers of marvels and visions washing over you like the walls of rain that follow one another seemingly endlessly in the monsoon, endlessly that is until they end, without warning, and then the bus shudders to a stop and you are finally, irrevocably there."
"The people of your village relieve themselves downstream of where they wash their clothes, a place in turn downstream of where they drink. Farther upstream, the village before yours does the same. Farther still, where the water emerges from the hills as a sometimes-gushing brook, it is partly employed in the industrial processes of an old, rusting, and subscale textile plant, and partly used as drainage for the fart-smelling gray effluent that results."
"Were, uncharacteristically, your technician to press you to reconsider, you would likely respond by falling silent, waiting for the pause to grow uncomfortable enough for him to glance in your direction. You would then meet his gaze, holding his eyes until he flicked them floorward and increased the curvature of his spine, gestures which, among teams of humans as among packs of dogs, signify one mammal’s submissiveness to another."
- →State-subsidized though it may be, your university is exquisitely attuned to money. A small payment and exam invigilators are willing to overlook neighborly cheating. More and someone else can be sat in your seat to write your paper. More still and no writing is needed, blank exam books becoming, miraculously, a first-class result.
- →Weeks pass and the pretty girl does not call. You are surprised and unsurprised, unsurprised because this was surely predictable, and surprised because you permitted yourself to hope it might be otherwise. You have learned by now that she will call eventually, but you give up on guessing when that might be.
- →Squatting is energy efficient, better for the back and hence ergonomic, and it is not painful. But done for hours and days and weeks and years its mild discomfort echoes in the mind like muffled screams from a subterranean torture chamber. It can be borne endlessly, provided it is never acknowledged.
- →In the moment she ceases to live, your sister is holding your mother’s hands, your mother like an infant struggling to take its first breath as it transitions from aquatic life to terrestrial, but in reverse, with her lungs filling with water, and the breath never coming.
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