According to a recent survey a list 94 new billionaires from India were added in the year 2023 alone.

And while there is a certain improvement in in the lives of the poor, it gapes the question of why there needs to be such a vast gap between the bourgeoise and the labour class?

Are all people born equal? Of course not. Some have their wits about them to go out there and make it in a highly competitive world, and so do deserve their high share of remuneration. What concerns the general public is when it gets way too large to comprehend and the explanations on the means of how they got the wealth doesn’t suffice.

Living in an increasingly cut-throat economic climate and an information superhighway of sorts, everything is fair game but when you see blatant discrimination if front of your face it’s hard to look away.

This whole conundrum could not have been summed up better by satirist Terry Prachet in his book the Duke of Ankh as the ‘Boots Theory’.

“They earned 38 dollars a month, plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots costs 50 dollars. But an affordable pair of boots which were OK for a season or two, cost 10 dollars. The thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. So, a poor person who could only afford cheap boots would have spent more on a cheap pair of boots than a wealthy person.”

Although, this problem is very ‘first world’, it talks about the socio-economic unfairness that exists everywhere. I will not go into the environmental impacts of discarding so many pairs of cheap boots, because that is a whole other article altogether. I would rather bring light to the lack of education that is dominant among the lower working classes. The above example, characterized in a whimsical way is an insightful metaphor for the workings of the world at large and how helpless we are in front of the pretence of knowledge.

We know how helpless we are to change anything significant. The wheels turn how they have always turned, but there needs to be two wheels for the world to operate in balance. it takes two hands to clap, the coin has two sides and the pendulum swings two ways. The rich and the poor will always exist. They both need each other.