Obelix & Co

The Romans started buying Menhirs for lot of gold from Obelix. I don’t remember the specifics of the plot but the front cover of the Astrix comic book, for some reason, has managed to stay alive in my head. The picture has Obelix in the foreground in his white and blue striped pants looking important and certainly very happy. In the background is what appears to be a quarry where little busy men are seen chipping stone off unfinished Menhirs. There must have also been a bag of gold coins somewhere in the picture.

Obelix, before the menhirs started fetching him gold, loved to feast on wild boar. He hunted them himself. Once he got busy managing his men and blowing the gold, he hired someone to hunt boars for him. Ofcourse, wealth is hard to conceal. And others started making menhirs too. And yet others started hunting boars for them. Very soon, half the men in the village were chiselling stone and the other half were hunting boar for them.

It was raining heavily while I was standing at the bus stop under the messy hanging flyover in Bangalore. (Why the structure was hanging and not behaving itself like its new born cousins all over the city, I don’t know.) Like all others, the bus stop had colourful ads all over. Advanced web designing. Call centre training. C C++. Advanced diploma in computer financial applications. Need Steel welders (free accommodation provided). Advanced this. Improved that. High value this. Cutting edge that. Wild boar hunters needed.

The village was soon a well-oiled giant menhir making machine. It gulped gold and spat menhirs. The gold percolated. It flowed from the menhir merchants to the quarry workers to the boar hunters. It flowed through tiny cracks. Not so visibly. There were the chisel makers. Chisels need wooden handles. So a crack opened to the lumbers. Lumbers need axes. It flowed further to the village blacksmith. To some mine from there. Back to the boar hunters. Back to the blacksmith. Over to the cobbler. The mason. The tailor…

Some machine. Some parts.

Watch closely and you can see the tiny cracks. It is harder to see gold flowing. A traffic police man has stopped someone. The rain is drowning their voices. But I can see a crack already. The youngster on his new bike doesn’t have the papers. Or probably he does but was over speeding. I see some gold flowing. The youngster is back on the road. The machine is running. Parts that don’t move to the rhythm wear off quickly.

Naturally evolved economies perform better compared to the top-down planned ones. Or so they say. I’m not so sure. They probably produce more menhirs. Probably more gold flows when the machine naturally evolves. But hey, what if the Romans stop paying for the menhirs? No. That’s not the part where we got it wrong. We might never stop making menhirs. But where’s Cacophonix? Where’s his harp? What’s he doing at the quarry anyway?

It is filthy behind the bus stop. And right in the middle is a little shop. Does gold trickle all the way here? I’m not so sure. What are the kids doing out in the rain? And why aren’t they in school? If they’ve been fed, what are they looking for in the dirt? Why are they eating the leftovers?

A nice friend once said that it was alright to accept a bribe as long as it was offered to you and not demanded by you. What a nice thing to say. What a perfectly fair way to cheat! The same message in different flavours has been played to me. By different nice people. In different nice settings. About very different nice things. Menhir merchants, the masons, the blacksmiths, the boar hunters. Everyone. All the nice people. They believe in a simple falsity: It is OK to cheat.

So it was not surprising to see the filth and the shop and the kids. After all, it is the nice people that make up all the nice parts of this machine.