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“Be careful whom you bow to: Many kings are beggars in disguise; some beggars are kings in disguise.”
~ the Wise Fool

“Ek meeta, malai-wallah dedo,” I tell him. Translated from Hindi, it means, “Give me a sweet one, and with cream.” I’ve learnt from experience to ask for precisely what I want from a coconut vendor. (Not a bad thing to practice in life either.) The vendor nods his head and picks out a yellowish-green coconut from the bunch piled high on his dingy cart. It’s not one I’d have picked, but what do I know about coconuts? He proceeds to work on it swiftly and deftly, twirling and tossing with one hand and hacking with the other. This coconut vendor is barely a teen. Tall, swarthy, oily hair, soiled shirt, pearly smile and a twinkle in his dark eyes. The curved machete is so sharp I wouldn’t trust it in the hands of a white-collar fool like me, let alone a teenager. One wrong move, and you’d be left with fewer fingers. The boy obviously knows what he’s doing. He pops the last bit of husk with the tip of the machete, sticks in a straw and hands it to me.

The coconut water is sweet, just like I’d asked for. But I can tell (from looking at the top of the coconut) that this will not yield any cream. Oh well, at least the kid got one part right. The elusive, melt-in-your-mouth, creamy coconut meat, when you’re lucky enough to get it, is the perfect finish to any coconut drink. When I’m done, I tell him, “Don’t bother cutting it open, there’s no cream.” He smiles (like one would at an ignorant child) and proceeds to cut it open anyway, insisting politely that there is. As I wait for the youngster to make a fool of himself, he pries open the coconut and shows me the halves lined with semi-translucent white meat. I’m speechless. Next, he crafts a spoon by lobbing off a piece from the side of the cocunut, scoops up the meat from the open halves and hands it to me. For the next few minutes, I’m in coconut heaven. If there is such a thing as the “perfect coconut experience” — I’m living it. Better than chocolate and almost as good as sex. The rest of the world may well have vanished along with all its problems. I’m completely oblivious to the traffic and the dust, the vaguely foul odor from the nearby ditch, and the hustle-bustle of the weekend movie crowd milling in and out of the local theater. On a hot day, a coconut will cool your body and nourish your soul. Ah, the mighty coconut: Living proof that nature loves us. What about the urban preference for Coke and Pepsi? They prove that we don’t believe it does. Sigh.

“That was incredible. How did you do it?” I ask him in Telugu. He replies in English with a knowing grin, “Experience.” Indeed. Coming from a kid, it’s irony. I wish the young fellow would teach his art to all the adult vendors in town. As he gets busy cutting up more coconuts for other customers, I slip him a ten rupee note and leave. He runs after me with a rupee coin. I ask him to keep the rupee as tip, but he insists on giving it back to me. I have to literally flee to get away from this fool. This is not the first time I’ve had to force a tip down a coconut vendor’s throat. Two nights ago I had a coconut drink from a man and his wife; they had conjured up a good coconut, offered great service, but refused my tip. Last week, as I was crossing a street in heavy evening traffic and holding a two-year, I tripped, causing the two-year old to fall. (Luckily this was after I’d already crossed the street). A man appeared out of nowhere to help pacify the crying child and his bruised, bloodied knee. And what do you know, he was a coconut vendor — he saw what’d happened, stopped what he was doing and rushed over to help. The coconut fellow comforted the child and offered him a coconut, which stopped the crying. This angel too refused my tip.

Now, I happen to believe that all great service merits a tip. That is, until these Indian coconut vendors tripped me up. These kings in disguise have made me examine and question some of my beliefs. Once again, I’ve come to see that generosity is not always a good thing; sometimes generosity kills. These coconut vendors of India may be poor, but there is a fire behind those eyes — which commands respect and expects it. Not by what they do or what they wear, but how they conduct themselves. Who am I to throw money at these people? These poor folks are rich in ways we cannot even fathom. They live in castles we cannot see. Their spirit dances in joy and they live their lives with a dignity that’s worthy of kings. No amount of money can buy what these people have. There is so much abundance in their poverty that those of us with riches would be lucky to have even some of it. The easiest way for me to trample on their dignity is with pity. They don’t need my pity; they deserve my salute. They don’t want my money; they want what is rightfully theirs. They are the only kings I’ll bow to in this day and age. As far as I’m concerned, the rest of the world is filled with far too many beggars masquerading as kings. Sure, there is a whole lot of gut-wrenching poverty on this planet, but, hey — relax! Because the most appalling of this is not the material kind; it is the spiritual kind.

All this is not to suggest that everyone who sells coconuts here in India is some kind of saint. Not at all. For no amount of disguise can mask some beggars. Why, I may have met the world’s grumpiest man the other day; he was a coconut vendor. The airport staff who harassed me for tips when I arrived in India (after insisting on help I did not need) — beggars. The man who irons clothes at my folks’ condominium complex, and who never misses a chance to tell you how poor he is — beggar. Perfectly able-bodied men at street corners, bus stops, and markets of India who’ve become masterful manipulators of human emotions — beggars. Global pharmaceutical companies and their CEOs who sell overpriced and questionable drugs to people in desperate need — beggars. GMO companies like Monsanto who sell “terminator” seeds to third world nations and promote GM technology with the pretext of feeding their hungry masses — beggars. Giant meat processors who knowingly release tainted meat from sick cattle into the American food chain — beggars. I could go on, but I think you get my point.

Getting back to our coconut man, let’s do some numbers. On a good day, a coconut vendor here will sell about 75 to 100 coconuts, priced at about ten rupees each. That’s about 1000 rupees, which comes to about twenty five dollars. About fifteen dollars of this twenty-five goes towards materials, transportation and other costs, leaving the vendor about ten dollars per day. Assuming he does this well every single day of the year (which is a stretch), the best he’s going to take home is about 3650 dollars per year. By comparison, total compensation of Terry S. Semel, CEO of Yahoo? $174.20 million dollars. Of course, he deserves it, but that’s not the point. While CEOs, whose payscale is already in the stratosphere, clamor for ever more compensation — these poor coconut vendors, who barely get by, refuse my tips. It’s a strange, strange world we live in, and this does not bother me. Life ain’t fair, and this too does not bother me. But what really troubles me is this: Some of us have plumb lost touch with the world we live in. And that’s putting it very mildly.

These coconut vendors are amongst the poorest people in this southern Indian state of Andhra, where eight out of ten people are BPL (below the poverty line). Contrary to what you might expect, it is not the poor eight I’m concerned about; it’s the other two. The newly affluent class in India (the 15-20% of the population) are fast acquiring diseases of affluence, once known only to the West. The city of Hyderabad (as are other cities in India) is growing in leaps and bounds. Most of the new people coming into the city are poor — without a shirt on their backs or a pot to piss in. They come to the city in droves looking for work. Because they can no longer make a living on their tiny plot of land back in their villages. Worse, they find out that even the piece of land they thought they owned belongs to someone else; it belongs to the money lenders, who used their land as collateral to loan them money to buy foreign GMO seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides.

What can do you do about all this? Simple: Watch where you spend your money — from the soap you use, to the food you eat, to the clothes you wear. Rather than give your money to the multinational beggars (who use it to plunder the world’s poor and eat away at the American middle class) you can spend it with your local businesses. That will give all these poor people in the far corners of the world (still holding on to their dignity, if only by a thread) a fighting chance of survival. Sure, the tides will turn again — the global corporate beggars will turn into dust in due time and the meek shall inherit the earth again.

Meanwhile, invest in Yahoo. And here’s to the glorious coconut and the coconut kings everywhere.

Namaste, the Wise Fool