The Hindu Business Line : Business foibles

"IF you do not have money, make money' a lender shouted at a client recently, also screaming "sell your kidney or liver or eyeball." Yes. This is a cruder version of `beg, borrow, or steal.' Though the general mentality of people these days seems to warrant a modified version: `Beg, borrow or cheat.' What else can one conclude from the following?

Two men in Cairo sold dog meat to the public as beef or lamb and were making a fast buck until they were caught. Police in Paraguay uncovered a scheme in which teeth stolen from dead bodies were being sold as new dentures by some strong-stomached men, who were able to hoodwink even dentists. The authorities had to appeal to the robbers to `leave the dead alone!'

Certainly original was the scheme of some Zimbabwean mortuary workers who rented out corpses temporarily to motorists, helping the latter to take advantage of the fuel preferences given to hearses to carry dead bodies to crematoria. In these instances, it was individuals who were the smart operators.

But what to say of a posh hotel (The Ritz) in Piccadilly, London, allegedly selling the wine left over by customers in its private dining room to others in its main restaurant? This in a country noted for people being fastidious about hygiene! And how crooked should have been that person of Beijing who chose to poison a reservoir in order to boost sales for water purifiers? In this case, the culprit's plea was that he was unemployed. (Is not an idle brain indeed the devil's workshop?)

There are other instances, too, where the unemployed have taken to `innovative' ways to make money. Much like the flourishing traders in the `Burma' and `Hong Kong' bazaars in all big towns and cities in India, a watch shop in Jakarta is reported to be openly dealing in `imitation wrist-watches' of renowned brands such as Rolex and Butgari. In a sense, can all those be considered variations of smuggling and counterfeiting?

Quite crazy must be the man in China who makes a living as a `human punchbag,' inviting `stressed-out' people to beat him up or rain punches on him, charging six dollars for every two minutes. But it is shocking that a pastor in Pretoria `faked his own abduction,' complaining to the police that he had been abducted, when in fact he was spending time in an entertainment complex with casinos (the truth came out later on).

In times of distress, there will be only sympathy, in general, for the graduates who become taxi drivers even in Singapore, an advanced economy. There is an element of pathos when we read that in Afghanistan, opium cultivation is done on a large scale, though it is against Islamic tenets, because a grower can earn far more from an acre of opium than from an acre of wheat.

Finally, none would find fault with a factory in East Germany (Altenburg) which makes playing cards in periods of economic crisis because, during the times people are not fully employed, they tend to play cards, and card packets are found to be cheap gift articles too!