2009/10/27 Samir Kelekar <samir_kele...@yahoo.com> > Very good point. There are no easy ways in today's > India to make Rs. 50,000/- for most people.
Samir, I think we are mistaken when we believe good education = make money! Some examples. I was eating a fish-cutlet-bread at my favourite Goan-style fast food joint at Miramar. The bread delivery man happened to come. Our conversation went thus: "You must be buying a lot of bread every day." "Yeah." "How many?" "About 800." I was not trying to probe into his economics, but was just curious. A little math astounded me. If we take the lowest price of a dish to be Rs 17, then the daily turnover (not profit) is Rs 13,600. But some dishes cost upto Rs 35. So... * * * Similar story at the Goan-style fastfood joint at Santa Cruz. Likewise at the samosa-batatawada-chicken curry fast food outlet at my village. Check out the turnover of the fast-food vendors outside the El Capitan theatre in Mapusa. But I'm not saying there's money only in food. A friend in the second-hand books market, told me he would have roomboys pick up left-behind novels from hotels along Goa's beach belt. He would give them some pocket money, two or three hundred rupee notes. They would be happy. Business is down now, due to the slack season. But in its peak, he had a turnover of about Rs 6000 a day ("it was mostly profit, because there were hardly any costs"). But then, not everyone wants to 'dirty their hands' with down-to-earth businesss. In addition, the average mom-and-pop style idea of a 'clean' business is to spend Rs 20 lakhs (in those days) to buy a tiny ground floor shop in Panjim or the suburbs, and then put up a photocopying ("Xerox") shop earning pennies! Probably not enough to even cover the cost of money they invested in the real estate.... Middle-class people like us would like some 'respectable' job, which has less takers and not so good payment structures. But I would still maintain that there are faster and 'less dirty' ways of making Rs 50,000 rather than murdering four people. (This is assuming the police are telling us the truth; they come out with good stories sometimes when under media pressure. Claude Alvares' and Linken Fernandes' co-authored 1979 [?] report on The State of the Goa Police is an eye-opener in this regard. And things have certainly not gotten better with time.) --FN -- Frederick Noronha :: +91-832-2409490 Writing, editing, alt.publishing, photography, journalism Books from Goa: http://tiny.cc/goabooks