For Richer and For Poorer...

Joey is single. He lives in Mangalore. He goes to pub on Saturdays. One Saturday evening, when Sri Ram Sene was making their presence felt elsewhere, he met a girl in the pub. He fell in love with her. He firmly believed that romantic love is the reason for all happiness in the world. Then Tommy came to that pub. He happened to be more appealing to people with extra X chromosome. So Joey lost his girl to Tommy and became single again. Now Joey is theorizing that romantic love is the root cause of all evils.

Let us pause briefly to size up Joey’s hypocrisy here. Joey is now denying the very concept of romantic love that made his affair possible in the first place. If it is not for the romantic love, Joey wouldn’t have enjoyed those estrogen infested moments of his life. Joey supported the concept of love when it was working in his favor and became repulsive to the same idea when it began to work in Tommy’s favor.

Most of us share Joey’s hypocrisy in a recessive economy. We blame free markets for all our financial woes without realizing that these are the markets that made it possible for us to earn anything at all in the first place. Just as it takes an awful lot of maturity for Joey to be committed to the concept of romantic love even after his break up, it takes lot of courage and honesty for us to be appreciative of capitalism in a recessive economy. Resorting to socialism or bureaucracy to get through these troubled times, is like Joey giving up romance and resorting to brothel for cheap love. It is disgusting and deplorable.