Jahane Rumi In search of the unsearchable: O, my soul! where would you find your house?

No Tolerance for Richistans – Obscene Wealth is not victimless!

Writing in the Guardian, Madeline Bunting laments the growing inequities in Britain. Her powerful critique is not jut applicable to the British society; in a world where global trends are aped and replicated by the hour, this is a damning comment:

".... huge wealth is now regarded as a fabulous spectator sport and massively enviable. It is also, most importantly, regarded as legitimate - the global economy is akin to a vast lottery, some just get lucky. The "winner takes all" has become a respectable formula of economic life, not evidence of a systemic injustice. Any other view is dismissed, in that derogatory phrase, as the "politics of envy". Peter Mandelson summed it up in 1998 with a magnificent use of adjectives: "We are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich.

The wealth may be obscene but the means of achieving it are presumed, naively, not. This wealth is perceived as victimless - not achieved at the expense of someone else's exploitation, but as a product of the near mystical vagaries of global stock markets....

We are as ghoulishly gripped by Richistan as if we were watching a car crash - and that's exactly what it is. A slow-motion catastrophe: an elite, however small, with this kind of immense wealth has a hugely disproportionate impact, skewing the whole frame of reference in a society of value, worth and status - which are all human needs basic to dignity and wellbeing."

I had earlier quoted Arundhati Roy in the South Asian context where the "growing middle class was reared on a diet of radical consumerism and aggressive greed.."

Some say it is inevitable, a sort of deterministic outcome. Others say, live with it. Well both are unacceptable positions.