Stay selfish, Stay foolish

That's a title inspired from Steve Jobs' speech at Stanford on "Stay hungry, Stay foolish", but it suits this discussion. Of late I've been having funny conversations with friends on the concept of marriage, to see how they react, and of course with a selfish interest to learn.

I would start like this - When we're one big happy family, and no one has "vested" interest in a different family, where'll there be problems, who'll think about God. So, marriage is a concept invented by God to divide and rule us. Marriage by itself is not the only problem, we create more problems around it, the most prominent being our children. We solve this new problem that we create by growing the children. Finally we get them married so that they can also create more problems and solve them. In all, we don't solve any existing problem, but convince ourselves that we're doing a great job. I would go on speaking more nonsense.

Finally, the discussions would boil down to one argument. When's the best result achieved - when everyone's selfish or when everyone's selfless? If everyone's selfish and takes care of own and the family, isn't the world taken care by itself. Well, most management concepts will tell you so, but is life another capitalistic playground? Help yourself, help your family, help your friends - be selfish, why care about the rest of the world anyways? But then if everyone keeps the house clean, who cleans the street? Well, it'll be someone who's paid for it so that he can take care of his own family. The argument would mostly stop here.

I included helping friends also in the list of selfish acts above. That doesn't mean I advocate charity as the most selfless act. I personally am not a big proponent of charity. But I am a big fan of communist ideas like bridging economic inequalities, reservations, etc. if they are rationally implemented. Recently I heard someone, who I remember once spoke so vehemently against caste-based reservation, come out openly in support of reservations for women. I didn't quite understand that though. Anyway, that's not relevant to this discussion. Let us hope that some day reservation becomes clean, and it takes suppression, economy, exposure, and everything else other than caste into account. May be when we reach that stage, reservations might not be required at all?

Coming back to our discussion about marriages and children, I am still having such funny conversations and still learning. If you've something even funnier, let me know too.