Wanted to share something with you that happened to me in the last 1 week. So I’ve been together with my father celebrating his birthday. I don’t know enough about all of his friends to make judgments, but one of the “friends” living with us was a businessman who is very influential and supposedly has tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars. He is relatively young for his success — 39 years old. He has great charisma and is very knowledgeable, his intellect often shining in discussions. I always knew that he was into some shady things in terms of money-making. But I just didn’t know to what extent. It turns out, my father told me, that his entire business is actually based on ripping poor people off😡. He has “call centers” where scammers working for him call innocent elderly people, war veterans, students, and all kinds of other vulnerable people, and tell them that their “bank account is frozen and they have to pay a certain amount of money to unblock it”, and other similar lies — all aimed at scaring and threatening these people to make money off them. And the worst thing is that these people are often times already highly vulnerable and poor in the first place. Another business that he has revolves around microfinancing, where people are given short term loans that quickly rise in interest. Again, the whole thing is meant to scam people. . A person takes 100-200 dollars to buy something, and in many cases they do it under difficult circumstances such as having to buy medicine, or under influence of drug addiction or gambling addiction. And the interest rises every week or month to the point where the initial 100 dollars becomes 10 thousand dollars in a matter of months! And then, they take away that person’s apartment [conti]

You see the kind evil I’m talking about here. And after all this, my father invites this man to his birthday party! This person paid for the entire villa which cost 12,000 dollars for 3 days as a birthday present for my father. But he paid it not with honest money, he paid for it with money made of other people’s sufferings.

And I’ve been feeling so deeply disappointed, disillusioned, and hurt when I found out all of this about him that I could not gather my thoughts together. How can my father, knowing all these things about this person, turn a blind eye? Isn’t this another form of evil? More importantly, I’ve been thinking what I should do about it. Here I was, shaking the hand of a person who is truly a devil in my eyes! I couldn’t help but feel a lot of ill will and hatred towards him after knowing the truth about him. And the other side of the story is that a lot of these other people at father’s birthday party were also crooks and criminals. I truly feel deeply saddened and want to know what is the right thing to do. Perhaps it is better for me to categorically avoid dealing with these people and avoiding their company as much as possible, even if it means denying my father. And my esteem of my own father has gone down in my eyes even more now. What a lack of principles! My father always complains about corruption in the government, but what a hipocrisy! I can’t help but become more and more cynical about human nature. And honestly i feel really really disgusted. All this falsehood ought to be cruelly and heartlessly destroyed, and yet it pervades.

I truly appreciate your idealism and fully endorse it. It requires a great courage to stand up for what you consider as true values even if it means going against the main current. Surely you should completely avoid such people, not only because of the ill effects of such a company but also because knowing that someone is engaged in criminal activities, one is duty bound to inform about it. To willingly party with such a person makes one a kind of indirect accomplice. Concealing a crime or turning a blind eye to it is a tacit involvement. So best is to stay away from such people and their parties. 

There is however a lesson to be learnt here. It is not to be carried away by men’s show of wealth and their riches or be carried away by outer appearances. But then one should not generalise it or become a cynic. Not all rich people are bad or have evil earnings. There are all kinds of people in the world and there is always enough goodness, often in the so-called common man, which makes this world beautiful and gives hope that the future is good despite the appearances and personal experiences of a few.

Affectionately,

Alok Da