Old Reliable

I used to thrill the reliability
of old jokes and puns,
the older the jokes were
the better I felt when I got a reaction
from who I was with when I quoted them.

Even the jokes in the plays
of George Bernard Shaw,
a contemporary of Oscar Wilde,
could be made to be fun
if they were adjusted for tone.

As I have gotten older
I have run out of humour,
and I have accepted isolation.

I now have to be both the feed
and the punchline of any joke
I imagine. Often I prefer silence.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist (3)

 'But I observe that you, sir, have stopped eating. Can it be sir that you are full? Very well, I will not insist; I will, however, order us some desert, a little rice pudding with sliced almonds and cardamom, the perfect sweetening for an evening such as ours, which is taking a turn towards the grimmer side. Such dishes may not normally be to your taste, but I would encourage you to have, at the very least, a tiny bite. After all, one reads of the soldiers in your country are sent to battle with chocolate in their rations, so the prospect of sugaring your tongue before undertaking even the bloodiest of tasks cannot be entirely alien to you.'.

From page 157 of 'The Reluctant Fundamentalist' by Mohsin Hamid, published in 2007. 

Great Turn Offs Of Our Time (28)

My mind skips several beats when the phrase
'Will be much missed' is used to describe
the appeal of a newly dead popular entertainer
who when s/he was alive walked the walk
where others talked the talk of hypocrites and liars.

The point about the person who is declared
'much missed' is that where radio and TV
were their medium they had already achieved
everything they set out to achieve there,
and had left before outstaying their welcome.

What was missed much more well before the star died
was that new project in the media that was their metier
whilst the shine of the star was bright enough to use it. 

From 'The Reluctant Fundamentalist' (2)

'The economy is an animal' Jim [my boss] continued. 'It evolves. First it needed muscle. Now all the blood it could spare was rushing to its brain. That is where I wanted to be. In finance. In the co-ordination business. And the is where you are. You're blood brought from some part of the body that the species does not need anymore. The tailbone. Like me. We come from places that were wasting away.'. I had finished replacing the tyre so I shut the boot and unlocked the doors. 'Most people don't recognise that, kid,' he said buckling himself in beside me and nodding his head in the direction of the building we had just left. 'They try to resist change. Power comes from becoming change.'.

From page 110 of 'The Reluctant Fundamentalist' by Mohsin Hamid, published in 2007.   

Cash Or Plastic Card?

I have a £50 banknote in my pocket. I go to a restaurant and pay for my dinner with it. My friend and I enjoy our meal, and we understand the point of eating out; the meal is a space for us to feel free to talk on any subject we like as we eat, and we don't have to wash up after we have eaten.

I pay the restaurant owner with the £50 who then uses the same £50 note to pay for the restaurant's laundry where the damask table clothes the customers have eaten off are sent to be washed. The laundry owner then uses the note to pay their barber for several haircuts. The barber will then use the note to pay for their food shopping. Allowing for inflation, after an unlimited number of transactions, the £50 that I tendered for the meal will still remain worth £50 and still buy whatever £50 buys. It has kept it's value and fulfilled its purpose by everyone, whether they bought material goods or services, whoever has used it for payment and no bank charge was incurred in any cash transaction made with the money.

But if I go to a restaurant and pay digitally via a credit or debit card and don't pay the Visa bill before any interest charges occur, the bank fees for my £50 payment transaction are charged to the seller are 3% - so around £1.50. And for every further transaction via credit with the original £50, that sum will eat up another 3 % in bank charges. With three credit card transactions the original £50 will be worth approximately £45.50, allowing for how as the total sum reduces so 3 % of each new total is slightly less than £1.50. With 30 transactions the initial £50 will be worth £45 bank charges with only £5 of it's original worth, adapted for inflation, still in circulation.

Even in a totally cash-based world there are ways of making money depreciate in value, ways for some of making others pay through the nose for badly organised services, or by simply hiking up prices. But for as long as people can count, and as long as the language around money is kept simple, then individuals in a cash-based society know where they are with each other much more the equivalent citizens in 'cashless', or credit card based, societies....

Use your cash whilst you can folks, or lose the value of your money via the opaque language used by banks…

From 'The Reluctant Fundamentalist' (1)

'I did not grow up in poverty, but I did grow up with a poor boys sense of longing, in my case not for what my family never had, but what we had had, and lost. Some of my relatives held on to imagined memories the way the homeless hold on to lottery tickets. Nostalgia was their crack cocaine, if you will, and my childhood was littered with the consequences of their addictions; unserviceable debts, squabbles over inheritances, the odd alcoholic and suicide. In this Jim [my boss] and I were similar: he had grown up outside the candy store and I had grown up on the threshold as the door was being shut.'.

Page 81 of  'The Reluctant Fundamentalist', by Mohsin Hamid, published in 2007.    

My Ideal Job

would be that of being paid to talk to plants
that, profoundly ignored, feel rather lonely,
particularly the plants sold by supermarkets
where they provide limp 'window dressing'
in an environment that encourages customers
to be so indifferent to themselves as they shop,
that the atmosphere beggars disbelief.

My success as an applicant would be proved
by how much in any interview for the post
my interviewer chose me via overtly ignoring me.