After reading about a competition in a NAGTY (National Academy for Gifted & Talented Youth) newsletter, Sadichha Regmi, one of our Y13 students, submitted the following piece of personal writing:

The Moneyhouse Effect

“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”   

 — Chinese Proverb

Dear Father,

We live in this materialistic world where diamonds are supposed to be a girl’s best friend, where people fly around in private jets without any guilt, probably without any consciousness that there are children dying of starvation as their planes take off. And then you hear about those rich people to whom jails are a second home because they have too much leisure at hand. And too much money, of course.

And you wonder what life is all about.

I suppose we all just want to be happy. But the world is so polluted. Polluted with technology and narrow mindsets…it’s difficult not to be overwhelmed. Our moral codes and values seem to sink deeper into an ocean of selfishness everyday. They are sinking at such a steady pace that soon they will hit the bottom of the ocean and there won’t be a place left to go to. There doesn’t seem to be a place for genuine feeling anymore. We avoid confrontation. We hide behind our lies and pretend we can bend the truth to fit our sorry consciences. People constantly take the easy option. In friendships, relationships and learning about ships. Fewer and fewer kids do physics at university. That upsets me very much, because it seems to represent a lot of changes we have undergone as human beings. Physics is the future of the world. It’s the world’s past! Don’t people care anymore? Don’t we care about where we came from or who we are? Or why we are here? Whether we really are just an accident? Self-centeredness led us to believe in God. We were too much in love with ourselves to consider that we may have just been a random truth – not created, not special, not any different from those animals and birds we so decidedly try and class as being inferior to us. I can’t understand why the hunger to know, to find out, has faded. Especially in times like these when God’s non-existence seems to be almost an established fact.

I don’t claim to be a believer. But I think that along with faith, our world has lost a lot of things. Families break apart, people kill in the name of a God they never really believed in, in the first place and life’s more about diamonds and pearls and big houses and Botox than it is about relationships and friendships and being alive, feeling alive. It’s more about what grades you have on paper and what jobs you can get than it is about what your ideals are, who your friends are…what you are as a person.

People steal music and pretend it isn’t a crime. Everyone is self-conscious and so many people have a velvet cover on to hide who they are underneath that it’s difficult to tell who is for real…if anybody is for real. Friends are possessions, your family-members mere objects. And strangers are no longer future-friends, they are people you will never get to know – they are whole new worlds you will never discover.

People don’t slow dance to good records anymore. It’s all digital. It’s about ipods, earphones and privacy. We’re all narcissists locked up in empty glass jars. When you’re in the bus queue, nobody will smile. And if (Newton forbid!) they do, you’re forced to feel suspicious and question what their motive must be behind those forty-two cheek muscles they were willing to stretch for somebody they do not even know.

And the world – it’s racing past. Life is racing past. It’s constantly ahead of me. I’m incessantly chasing, always catching up. I always miss the bus. And the not-future-friends laugh when they see me run from stop to stop, out of breath, just wishing the driver would stop pretending he cannot see me through his rear view mirror.

*

So I am going to stop living life the way some ancient monarch probably decided his subjects ought to live. I am going to collect mud from the seven continents and water from all five oceans. I am going to slow dance in the rain and let the wind sweep through my hair when I’m on top of a cliff. I am going to smell the earth when it rains on a hot day. It will not matter if I have dirt on my nose. I am going to climb a mountain. I am going to find some real friends. If I cannot, if they are too all taken in by this materialistic world, I will try contacting aliens. Until they reply, however, I have me. I will talk to the birds and the bees. I will live on the top branch of a tree and befriend the parrot who shares his tree with me. I will promise not to steal his wife’s eggs and he will give me a walnut in return.

I will fish for my food in the nearby sea. I will sing to myself in the moonlight and thank you, father, for the things you taught me: for teaching me how to be happy, how to have fun, how to be me. And for that gift you gave me, which is better than anything money could ever hope to buy – you taught me to fish instead of fishing for me, father, and until I die, that will be the greatest gift I will ever have received.

Yours ever, Arie.

Sadichha’s entry was one of the winners and it has now been published in a book entitled The Greatest Gift.