{"id":4836,"date":"2015-09-23T06:13:20","date_gmt":"2015-09-23T10:13:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=4836"},"modified":"2015-09-23T06:13:20","modified_gmt":"2015-09-23T10:13:20","slug":"the-financial-expert","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=4836","title":{"rendered":"****The Financial Expert"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"India,

(photo: Mario Lapid, creative commons license)<\/p><\/div>\n

By R. K. Narayan <\/a>(1906-2001)\u2013 A friend brought me this book from a trip to India, where the acclaimed author is well appreciated for his classic tales. They combine a deceptively simple narrative style and acute perceptions of human nature in all its absurdity and poignancy. Graham Greene was an early Narayan admirer and helped bring his work to attention in the West.<\/p>\n

In this novella, the hero, Margayya, although indubitably Indian, also is \u201ca type which should have taken its place long ago in world literature because he exists everywhere.\u201d Margayya, whose name means \u201cthe one who showed the way,\u201d indeed does show the way, although his ultimate destination is not what he hopes or has planned. His story begins in his early career, sitting daily underneath a banyan tree at the center of his dusty village with his small box of forms and pens, helping peasants sort their finances, brokering loans, and earning barely enough to keep his wife and adored son, Balu, in food.<\/p>\n

Over the course of the book, his financial prospects greatly improve, Balu grows up, and Margayya rises to great heights on the back of his miraculous financial innovation that the reader recognizes as, essentially, a Ponzi scheme. But ungrateful Balu proves Margayya’s undoing, and the lesson stretches beyond the financial calamity it produces: \u201cThe only element that kept people from being terrified of each other was trust\u2014the moment it was lost, people became nightmares to each other.\u201d<\/p>\n

As the plot winds toward the inevitable, Margayya\u2019s vanities, his obliviousness disguised as business acumen, and the jockeying for advantage of everyone around him\u2014in an economic environment where so little advantage is to be had\u2014provides ample fodder for\u00a0 the kind of laugh-at-ourselves \u201chumour that knows no national boundaries,\u201d says Der Kurier,<\/em> Berlin, also the source of the earlier quote.<\/p>\n

The story takes place in the mid-1920s to 1940s, when colonial rule in India was drawing to a close and the country\u2019s legendary legacy of bureaucracy was increasingly entrenched. This exchange between two of Margayya\u2019s acquaintances sums up the incessant frustrations:<\/p>\n

The first man is commenting on his difficulties getting a nuisance business moved somewhere else: \u201c. . . you know what our municipalities are!\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Second man in an aside to Margayya: \u201cHe is himself a municipal councillor for this ward . . . and yet he finds so much difficulty in getting anything done. He had such trouble to get that vacant plot for himself\u2014\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

First man: \u201cI applied for it like any other citizen. Being a municipal councillor doesn\u2019t mean that I should forgo the ordinary rights and privileges of a citizen.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Well said. I laughed out loud.<\/p>\n

In the introduction to another of his books, Narayan says that in India \u201cthe writer has only to look out of the window to pick up a character and thereby a story,\u201d and in Margayya he has selected an unforgettable protagonist and packed his tale with humanity.
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