What is a man if he is not a thief who openly charges as much as he can for the goods he sells?
~~ Mahatma Gandhi ~~ (1869 - 1948)
Now that is a good question to ponder.
Just because you can charge for something as much as you want and people will pay for it because they don’t have a choice, doesn’t make it a smart business. Rather, it displays a pickpocket mentality; steal as much as you can while you can!
A classic example happening right now is in the crude oil business. It costs approximately $2 to produce a barrel of crude oil in Saudi Arabia and $15 in Alberta, Canada; yet, at the moment, oil is trading over $120 a barrel! How come?
Now everybody will agree that to survive and prosper, a business has to make a reasonable profit - the keyword being ‘reasonable’. To charge $120 for something that costs $2 or $15 to produce cannot be called reasonable by any stretch of the imagination! Of course the price of oil is not determined solely by the producers; there are many other players like the oil companies, traders, speculators etc. etc. - just fancy names for pickpockets! And they would have us believe that it’s all a question of supply and demand! Or which has become even more fashionable now-a-days: Blame everything on the emerging economies of India or China or both. :-)
If all these players in the oil industry were to limit their profits to a reasonable level, the price of oil will certainly not be what it is today. Gandhi would call it theft, not business. I agree.
What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?
~~ Mahatma Gandhi ~~ (1869 - 1948)
So true and as events of the past few years in Iraq have shown that those in positions of power could not care less as to how much death or destruction their actions will cause. They have an agenda and they will follow that agenda conveniently using the holy name of liberty and democracy as a cloak. How much death and destruction their agenda will cause doesn’t seem to enter into their calculations or, which is even more likely, they are not intelligent enough to figure out death and destruction their actions will cause. Even worse, they usually laugh off the death and destruction caused by their actions as ‘collateral damage.’ For the dead, maimed or orphaned, the damage is not collateral but as real as the real can be.
And Iraq is just one of the examples of such madness. There have been many others in the past and, undoubtedly, there will be many in the future. The only way to stop such madness will be for the people all over the globe to rein-in their governments. The politicians have demonstrated time and again that they cannot be trusted.
There is more to life than increasing its speed.
~~ Mahatma Gandhi ~~ (1869 - 1948)
There has to be more to life than just increasing its speed. We are too engrossed in the speed; everything must be done faster and faster. Where is the limit? Does increasing the speed of life improves our quality of life? I don’t think so. We are all in a kind of a rat race, everybody is trying to outrun the other.
In some instances, increasing the speed of certain electro-mechanical devices may be necessary or beneficial. For example, if we want to explore other planets and outer space, the increase in speed is a necessity. But it seems our appetite for speed in every facet of our lives has consumed us and we have become addicted to increasing the speed of life in general, without pausing to think if and how it adds to the quality of our lives.
On the contrary, our addiction to speed leads to several harmful results. For example, due to the hectic (faster?) pace of life, stress levels among the people are on the increase. Take the automobile - most of us drive automobiles and we usually try to drive faster than the legal speed limit or faster than the road conditions permit resulting in many accidents and even deaths. Usually there is no pressing reason for us to drive faster, we just do it because we are addicted to it. Same goes for fast foods; we never seem to have enough time to prepare and eat healthy food, so to get our food fast we resort to easting fast foods or TV dinners. The results of this are proving to be disastrous, we are all getting fat. Some cities in North America reporting as much as 30% of their population as obese; that means one in three persons is obese! In my view, that is a disaster.
We need to take a pause and think if increasing speed in every facet of our lives and keep increasing it is really necessary. There has to be something more to life than just increasing its speed.
It is difficult but not impossible to conduct strictly honest business. What is true is that honesty is incompatible with the amassing of a large fortune.
~~ Mahatma Gandhi ~~ (1869 - 1948)
Whether we like it or not, the fact is that most, if not all, businesses are conducted dishonestly. It is possible or should be possible to conduct honest business with some reasonable return on investment but that will require hard work, sacrifice and patience. Most businesses concern themselves with producing stinking profits and to heck with honesty and fairness.
A good example right now is the oil companies. They raise the gasoline prices at the pump as soon as the price of crude oil goes up but when the price of crude oil falls they take their time to lower the gas prices at the pump. They justify the delay in lowering prices by saying that they cannot immediately lower the prices at the pump because they have inventories which they bought at the higher price. That seems logical but then they should not immediately raise gasoline prices when the price of crude oil goes up because they must have inventories which they bought at the lower price. This practice of theirs may be legal but it is certainly not honest, fair or moral.
Oil industry is not the only industry that indulges in such practices; most industries do. The motto seems to be to devise creative ways to rip off the consumer and maximize profits to line the pockets of a few. Shameful but true!
I claim to be no more than an average man with less than average abilities. I have not the shadow of a doubt that any man or woman can achieve what I have, if he or she would make the same effort and cultivate the same hope and faith.
~~ Mahatma Gandhi ~~ (1869 - 1948)
I think Mahatma Gandhi is being modest when he says he is no more than an average man. However, his advice is a good one. An avearge person can achieve a lot provided he or she is committed to the goal, continues to make efforts in that direction and doesn’t quit when the going gets tough.
Gandhi himself was physical beaten and imprisoned many times by the British authorities but he never wavered from his principle of non-violence, continued to persistently devote his energy to realize his dream and ultimately achieved his goal of freeing India.
Einstein said of Mahatma Gandhi:
“Generations to come will scarcely believe that such a one as this walked the earth in flesh and blood.”
It’s the action, not the fruit of the action, that’s important. You have to do the right thing. It may not be in your power, may not be in your time, that there’ll be any fruit. But that doesn’t mean you stop doing the right thing. You may never know what results come from your action. But if you do nothing, there will be no result.
~~ Mahatma Gandhi ~~
Action is, of course, very important to produce any result. And it’s a great ideal to do the right thing and not to worry about the fruits but, unfortunately, most of us want just the fruits and don’t care much about right or wrong action except perhaps pay a lip service once in a while.
