Poverty, a qualification for success?

Two things that happened recently made my mind go a-wandering, yet again.

Credit: SCMP

#1. A friend, whom I have not met for some time now, appeared in my life during the course of my career. About twelve years previously, he became a widower after his thirty-something wife succumbed to the menace of the crab. Left to care for three young girls, ranging from ages of eight to twelve, he took it upon himself to be the sole provider of maternal and paternal love, all lumped to one. With his meagre income and a lot of helping hand from his extended family members, he forewent female intimacy and sacrificed simple pleasures of life to make parenting his sole purpose of existence. Fast forward twelve years later, the girls have managed to attain academic excellence. Each of them is pursuing careers by their own merit in local institutions respectively in medicine. Law and accountancy. It seems like poverty and melancholy never dragged them but instead propelled them forwards. They whipped fate to change their future.

#2. Another friend whom I had not met for 30-over years manifested himself out of the blues. Starting life in the humblest of circumstances, he had beat destiny to be a globe-trotting consultant of sorts. After realising that there is no place like home, he returned home to Malaysia. 

After a guided tour of the house, he told my son that the study room was as big as his whole house, area wise, the home, he grew up as a child. He reiterated that the young generation does not have worry about the nitty gritty about surviving but instead can channel their energies towards reaching greater heights that were never dreamt by their elders. In their own ways, they had a head start in life.

"Litre of Light" - a simple initiative in the 

Philippines to bring brightness to the poor with

just a plastic bottle filled with water.

More than half a century ago, as one of my uncles was trying to unshackle himself from the clutches of poverty through education, he had to appeal to a school headmaster for his kind office for a placement in his school. Being born to a rolling stone father who rolled from town to town without collecting any moss, he had no certificates of proof of his educational achievements. My uncle tried to plead his case by invoking his debilitated state of his economic affairs. The learned man told him, "Boy, poverty is no qualification but, in you I see the drive to succeed. That, no piece of paper can be a substitute!"

Necessity is the mother of all inventions, they say. True to that adage, the simplest of inventions usually from the most deprived of the society. Look at the ingenious ways things are used beyond their intended inventions by people in economically deprived areas of the world. (See picture).

Conversely, when there is abundance in a society, instead of reaching for greater heights, the denizens are lulled into boredom, lack of innovations and paradoxically melancholia of intangible things that seem ludicrous to their deprived counterparts in the land of barren!

P.S. Then there is another lady friend who grew up so poor that her family bonding time would include copying textbooks. They could not afford to buy textbooks so they would borrow the books from their affluent friends and the whole family would burn the midnight to copy the book in verbatim. Now she looks at those times and appreciates her family better.

Inevitable by-product of affluence?

See what I picked up off WhatsApp...


*Parent Induced Wastefulness* (PIW)


When parents strive to give their children the best of everything at an early age, they are sowing seeds for materially insatiable monsters that are prone to sloth, apathy, avarice and fear.

Don’t stand in self-defence as yet. I have proof.
As I sit in my counsellor’s chair day after day I encounter an altogether a new disorder that I have come to label as- *Parent Induced Wastefulness* (PIW).

Here are a few examples:

* 26-year-old Manas does not want to finish his Engineering degree because he does not ‘feel like’ studying.
But he harasses his parents every day for money.
He tells me that whenever he did not feel like doing any particular activity, his parents told him he could quit.
They always said they did not want him to get ‘stressed’ like they were when growing up.

* 34-year-old Raghav is a qualified Engineer and is married for two years but his wife is not ready to live with him hence the counselling.
He is qualified alright but refuses to stick to any job as it makes him feel stressed!
Every two months he runs back home from work and wants his parents to solve his problem like they did every time he refused to go to school.

* 28 years old Anjali does not want to go back to her one-year-old marriage because it is too much for her to work in the office and then look after the household.
She wants her mother to come and live with her and do the household work.

There are many others...
but all originating in overzealous parents wanting to protect their children from even the smallest discomfort in childhood.
You love them alright, but when you shell them from the adversities of life, what you are doing is bringing them up in a sterile environment.
The result: the moment they are exposed to the world their immunity buckles up and they stand threadbare wanting to run away from everything that is anything but comfortable.

They have to live in this very world and away from you.
Do you really love them?
Or do you love yourself more?
If it is them, then you would ensure to make them future ready- let them face, talk to them, provide support, but let them face housework, studies, bullying and adversities.
Tell them money is limited and let them learn to hear a lot of ‘NO’.
That’s what makes them 'FUTURE READY'.

- *Dr. Sapna Sharma*
Psychotherapist, Spiritual Counselor, Life Reinvention Coach & Motivational speaker.

Customers from hell?

George Bilainkin, the multi-lingual Polish-Jewish editor the Strait Echo of Penang in the early 1930s made some astute observations on board his ship from England to the port of Penang. He noted the peculiar the way people behave at the first class six course dinner. The very people who had never been served a sumptuous meal back home are the very people who had so much complains about the service and the food!

Very much around us!

Now how often we have seen this...

Just the other day, whilst deeply engaged in my meal with family at a cosy upmarket eatery, I had the pleasure of a family joining an adjacent table. Apparently they had arrived later than the pre-arranged time. No, there were not happy with the sitting arrangements. After much bargaining, they settled in amidst much pomp and pandemonium. No, they brought their own cake and they could not be paying extra charges for serving as the primary aim of their visit was to celebrate a family member's special day. "Okay, okay, we will waive that,"said the captain. "Happy birthday!"

After much commotion, the main course was ordered. Of course, they had special requests on their orders. They wanted this in and that out, this done that way and that done that way. Somehow, the ordering got out of the way after much hullabaloo. And their conversation got louder. Wait, were they arguing?

Then a few hand raising at the waiter for their meals to be delivered quick. The way they pissed off the staff with their behaviour, I wonder what special additives were added to their dish to get back at them. In between of their gobbling of the chow, a few requests for sauces and seasonings. And again.

The excitement of the day must have ended with the haggling of the bill. "No, we did not order this and that. I cannot pay for that. Not fair!"

Their departure must have been a sigh of relief for the men and women of the working class variety at that restaurant. They had had enough excitement for a night. What they cannot understand is why somethings are never enough for some people. They console themselves by telling themselves that variety is the spice of life. You win some and lose some. Were they scared of being fleeced just like how they did to others as they tried to scale life? Or was the world so unforgiving that they saw conmen at every corner and it was payback time? Or just simply that they wanted to announce to the world that they have arrived and they did it their way, just like Frankie did? The nouve rich. And a small fraction of them can be a nagging pain in the you know where, neck!

What has sorry got to do with it?

http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/459087/A-case-of-affluenza-The-drink-drive-killer-16-who-is-too-rich-and-spoiled-for-jail

A case of 'affluenza': The drink-drive killer, 16, who is too rich and spoiled for jail

IT'S the case that’s outraged America: a drunken teenager responsible for four deaths walks free because he’s a ‘victim’ too – of his parents’ wealth

By: Simon Edge

Published: Tue, February 11, 2014

Ethan Couch from Texas, USA, killed four people in a crash while drink-driving [AP]

It was shortly after 10pm on a hot June evening last summer when a bunch of teenagers from an affluent suburb of Fort Worth, Texas, stole two cases of beer from a Walmart supermarket. They had been drinking already and when an hour later 16-year-old Ethan Couch volunteered to run an errand to a late-night chemist some of them told him he was in no fit state. But when he insisted on it they all piled into his father’s red Ford truck, six in the cab and two in the open back.

The truck was accelerating at 70mph in a 40mph residential zone when it ploughed into two parked cars. Breanna Mitchell, a young chef on her way home from work, had stopped with a fl at tyre, and local resident Hollie Boyles and her twenty-something daughter Shelby had come out to help her. Brian Jennings, a youth pastor in his early 40s, had also stopped his car to lend a hand.

All four were thrown 60 yards and died instantly. Emergency staff called to the scene described seeing body parts all over the road. The speeding truck turned over and hit a tree. None of the joyriders were wearing seat belts and two were seriously injured, including Sergio Molina, 16, who was left unable to move, eat or talk as the result of a brain injury.

Meanwhile Jennings’s car, in which two of his children were waiting, was knocked into the path of a passing Volkswagen, one of whose occupants was also injured. Of the 12 survivors, only three did not require hospital treatment.

One of those was Couch. Belligerent with the police, he was so drunk that when he tried to walk away he got tangled in a wire fence. His blood alcohol level was three times the legal limit three hours after the crash and he was found to also have valium in his system.

Expressing no remorse, he pleaded guilty to four counts of manslaughter and might have expected a 20-year prison sentence. That’s what another 16-year-old drink driver, Eric Miller, received when he was up before the same judge a decade earlier – and he had a much lower blood alcohol level and had killed one victim not four.

But as a result of a judgment that has shocked America, Couch will not serve a day in prison. Instead he was given 10 years’ probation, during which time he can’t drink or drive, and was ordered to attend a £275,000-a-year rehab centre in California at his family’s expense, for an unspecified time.

When we arrived the first thing he did was jump in the pool with his clothes on, rip his shirt off then start downing a big bottle of vodka. He was really knocking it back. He must have drunk about six or seven shots in one go

Why? Because, according to a psychologist who testified in his defence, the teenager was a victim of “affluenza”. In other words he was so rich he didn’t know any better and couldn’t understand that his actions would have consequences. That the judge seemed to agree with this view has outraged his victims and caused a national furore across the United States.

“What is the likelihood if this was an African-American inner-city kid that grew up in a violent neighbourhood to a single mother who is addicted to crack and he was caught two or three times… what is the likelihood that the judge would excuse his behaviour and let him off because of how he was raised?” asks distinguished psychologist Professor Suniya Luthar.

Ethan’s father Fred Couch is a businessman who owns a sheet metal works with an annual turnover of £9million and around 30 staff. After a difficult divorce from Ethan’s mother Tonya, he reportedly gave his son the use of a mansion in the suburb of Burleson where he lived alone and ran wild.

A teenager invited there three nights before the fatal crash reported: “Ethan lived in this big place with a long winding driveway that went all the way round to his back yard, which had a large pool in it. When we arrived the first thing he did was jump in the pool with his clothes on, rip his shirt off then start downing a big bottle of vodka. He was really knocking it back. He must have drunk about six or seven shots in one go.

“That set the tone and from then on he was just boasting and trying to impress us about how much he drank and how much he partied. He also boasted about selling drugs and getting big amounts of marijuana delivered to his house. He kept saying that he lived in the place alone and could do whatever he wanted. At first I didn’t believe him but when we went inside there were empty liquor bottles everywhere and what looked like joint butts in the ashtrays.”

At the trial psychologist Dr Dick Miller testified that Couch had been brought up in a household so indulgent that boundaries had never been established for his behaviour, giving him “freedoms no young person should have”. He cited his parents’ decision not to punish him after he was found by police in a parked truck with an unconscious, undressed 14-year-old girl a year before the crash. He had also been allowed to drink from the age of 13.

One of his friends testified that Couch said his family “would get him out of anything”. Despite that boast, district judge Jean Boyd’s decision not to impose a custodial sentence – originally made in December and upheld last week after prosecutors asked her to reconsider – has left the victims aghast. “There needs to be some justice here,” said Eric Boyles, who lost his wife and daughter in the carnage. “For 25 weeks I’ve been going through a healing process. And so when the verdict came out, my immediate reaction is: I’m back to week one. We have accomplished nothing here.”

The suggestion that Couch was a victim of his family’s wealth may yet backfire on his parents. They are now facing multi-million-dollar legal claims by the victims and their families. Wendy Davis, Democratic candidate for governor of Texas, has called the sentence a “disgrace” and even Dr Miller says he regrets ever mentioning the word affluenza, which was coined by two Australian academics as the title of a 2005 book about the stress, depression and obesity associated with consumer life.

“I wish I had not used that term,” he says. “Everyone seems to have hooked on to it.”

He is right about that. In California, a member of the state assembly has introduced a bill that would ban trial lawyers from invoking the supposed condition as a defence or in mitigation for sentencing.

“It doesn’t take a crystal ball to see that the relatively lenient sentence that this gentleman in Texas received will lead attorneys to see this as something to use in their overall tool box,” he says.

And before you think this is the kind of thing that could happen only in America, a pair of Scottish oil workers got away with community service orders last month after launching a drunken attack on a fellow customer in a bar in Aberdeen. Their defence was that they were suffering the effects of having too much money.

Meanwhile Ethan Couch has said nothing. Having been proved right in his pronouncement that his parents could get him out of anything, why should he need to say sorry?