Money to be made in chaos

The Night Manager (S1E1-6, TV series; 2016)

Adapted from a novel by John le Carré

The more we read history, the more we realise that things remain the same. If, during the era of imperialism, colonial powers took all it took to pin down their subjects into economic hopelessness and total dependence on their masters. Slowly the natives wised up and reclaimed the place in the sun. Just when they thought the world had turned into a level-playing field, the reality finally hit them right smack on their faces. The rapaciousness of the West to subjugate their former colonies continues.

If during British Raj, the British used Indians as proxies to fight with each other. Unknowing to both of them, the skirmishes weakened both parties, making them vulnerable to foreign powers to exert their influence. These powers just walk in, shake their heads in the devastation and trap the savaged into various debt traps. The next step is to dictate terms of how to rule and handle the economy.

Look around. We see this happening to countries (and citizens) with differing views on how their country should be run. Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Turkey and Pakistan and even India are testimony to this. Even though these countries struggle with a future, their warring factions are armed to their teeth to annihilate their fellow countrymen. Thanks to the monetary support from the West, who incidentally are makers of arms.

The Night Manager is an exciting miniseries with the good old story of espionage and international arms dealings. It tells about the corruption of officials at all levels who make deals like this possible. We only talk of third-world civil servants being inefficient and corrupt. The web of dishonesty goes all the way to the West, whose government has no qualms about letting it go unchecked. There is money to be made in chaos.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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Everything has a price!

Joseph (Malayalam, 2018)

Director: M Padmakumar

This movie gives another twist to how man's greed hijacks a noble intention like organ donation. Good virtue has been held in high esteem and is said to be the raison d'être of man’s existence. The sound of one man’s death knell signalling another's beginning of life sounds cruel, but that is how life is. Death and tragedy in the goat family are signs of survival and satiety in the tiger family.

As creative as a man can be, he knows about demand and supply, market forces and the electrifying power of the currency. Money, a lubricant in most transactions, eases this. The desperate seeker calls these middlemen God-sent. The mourners find solace in knowing they had done one good deed before the last call. The observers call it unscrupulous when they see the donors donating before their time is up and the deserving recipients are bypassed for the highest bidder. 

Man has converted everything into businesses, invented creative schemes to monetise even cadaveric organs, and, if needed, expedited death when the situation demands. They become the ‘invisible hands’ that guide the economy. 

Socrates may have convinced Greeks and generations after him to promote good virtue and philosophy as the basis of human living. Plato preached that a wise person uses his mind to understand moral reality to apply it to daily life. No more; this train of thought is so passé. It is not applicable in kali yuga. We all bow to the Money God. Virtue is so Satya and Treta yuga. 

They say our data is protected, and our personal pledges are classified. Any firewall is only as good till the next version hits the market. These systems' inventors will leave a loophole for them to market their next upgrade. 

Hence, our private data, including medical information, are all out for scrutiny. Hackers, in collaboration with sneaky businessmen who regularly taint noble professions, will stop at nothing to scheme out plans after plans to profit themselves. 

In this movie (spoiler alert), pledged donors are screened during their routine medical examination and matched to potential foreign recipients. A fake accident is arranged by thugs in a remote locale. A Good Samaritan, also part of the gang, would bring the accident victim to a predestined hospital. The victim would invariably perish without regaining consciousness. Organs will be harvested. Local recipients planning to receive these transplants would undergo dummy operations, but the organs would be shipped far away. 

A retired police officer had to lose two family members, his late teen daughter and his wife, to these fraudsters before smelling a rat. He devised an elaborate to uncover the whole network. 

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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The press feeds the public what they want, scoops!

Vadhandhi: The Fable of Velonie (Rumours; 2022)
Writer & Director: Andrew Louis

Everybody talks about wanting to know the truth. That the truth should prevail. That the truth will punish the wrongdoer. That the truth will eventually come out, sooner or later. There is a pressing need to discover the truth so that things can be put right so that man-made law can mete justice. Really?

Firstly, truth is a double-edged sword. One man's perspective of the truth can be another's blatant lie. Seeing is not believing. How often our senses have played tricks on us. So often, we have been convinced by suggestion. The police can tell that eyewitness accounts can only be believed so much. We are prejudiced by appearance, race, background and stereotyping.

Then some are so cocksure about something. Perhaps they have a vested interest or want to be in the limelight, to feel important. Maybe they like to steer the investigation the wrong way because they are involved somehow. 

Remember those who spin rumours just for the kick of it. They capture our sense of curiosity to yarn tales of lies and half-truths to spice up a tragedy. Maybe they are looking for clickbait. Little do they care how negatively it would affect the grieving or affected party.

In this age of breaking news, the press would go to all lengths, low down and dirty, to scoop out scandals to whet the viewer's appetites. There is a demand for these. As we increasingly become desensitised by gore and horror, the more demand for sensationalism. 

So when a pretty young thing is found strangulated at a film site, everyone gets curious. Everyone has their theory of what actually happened. The media is out to churn everything in the name of the public wanting to know. The police are on tenterhooks as pressure mounts to solve the case and find the perpetrator. In the meantime, the grieving party has to endure the hopelessness of losing a loved one, harassment of the press, accusatory fingers of the judging eyes and exposure of family wrongdoings that were kept under wraps for so long. The victim and her family are trialled in media from the public lens. In the meantime, fiction writers start their storytelling trade under the guise of wanting to discover the truth. At the same time, they do not fail to mention that their story is based on actual events. Just how much it is related to true events is where it gets blurred.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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