What is the Connection Between Moral Values and Being Super Rich?

My journey in the past one year has brought me to many realizations. The recent episodes of delayed salary have been pushed to one thought after another. I don’t know whether they are right and wrong, but I have written what has been coming to my mind. While the companies spend lavishly on other things, they forget to pay the employees on time, such episodes have forced me to look at life in a different way, here is how it goes… 

I have been working for an immigration company for nine months now.

A lady who worked for a premier newspaper company in India hired me.

She was impressed by my writing, told me she had been searching for a writer for more than 3 months, and then she interviewed me.

It is a personal achievement for me that I am a better content writer from the number of candidates she interviewed in those three months.

In the past nine months I have been working for her, many times I had doubts about her decision as we had a number of altercations.

On one occasion I had even resigned from the post, but she asked me to take the resignation back.

I was not happy because she had emailed her senior on the quality of my writing.

I decided to resign because I didn't want to be humiliated in case she did not find my writing up to the mark.

To prevent further altercations and come across a situation where she had to complain about me to her senior I decided to be relieved of my post.

In the next two or three months I would be due for an increment, and a complaint letter like this would be counterproductive. According to me, this letter was mailed with this intent only.

I have been working as a professional for over fifteen years now and I am well aware of the strategies seniors use to reduce the number of their juniors, particularly when the increment time comes.

Within an hour of mailing my resignation, the first call came from the HR head. She asked me to explain my decision, which I detailed.

She said If the department or this organization had not been happy with my work then I would not have survived nine months here.

After that, I received a call from the one who employed me. Her tone was quite different from the complaint she mailed to her senior.

She said that I am valuable to the organization and the mistakes that she had pointed out were just to make things better and not to deduct my number in front of the senior management.

I did not completely buy what she said. After some discussion and putting my side, I decided to take back my resignation.

Why I am talking about this here is - that every company demands quality work but when it comes to paying that quality is not seen.

Today it is 11 October and we have still not received this month's salary. Tomorrow is the Dussehra festival.

The company that I am working for demands top quality British-like English from me while I write my article, but when it comes to paying salary they forget the standards they demand.

This is not the first time that such a salary delay has happened. My experience in the immigration sector in particular has been like this only.

Before working for this immigration consultant, I worked for another immigration consultant for around two and a half years and the salary experience was the same there.

There was no fixed date as to when we will receive the salary.

Just one week back there was a celebration for the birthday of the owner of this company. The whole office was decorated with balloons.

To a rough estimate, they must have wasted nearly five thousand rupees in balloons only. Plus there were other expenditures as well.

They are organizing seminars and webinars every week and foreign delegates come here. Money is spent there as well. But they do not have any system to pay the employees on time.

I feel sorry particularly for the office boys who are working here. They are not paid that much that they can save, plus they are living in rented accommodation.

These people do not even have money to pay the rent for the rooms. This is simply a misuse of power and authority, plus the state of unemployment in the country.

Businesspersons, particularly the middle-level kind, are completely taking advantage of the high unemployment rate of the country.

They know that it is difficult for people to find jobs and they often bargain on the salary or delay paying the salary.

What I ask or rather request here is to have a fixed date for paying the employees. If they want to pay on the 15 so be it, we employees will manage our expenses accordingly.

Having no fixed date on when the salary will be paid puts us at the complete mercy of our employers.

We are neither in a position to leave the job as our salary is stuck nor do we have the motivation to continue working.

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Today is 22 October, and my colleagues and I received our salary 2 days back. The big Indian festival of Karwachauth was celebrated at my home without much to spend.

Today I saw the owner of my company, rather the head of the immigration department of this organization standing beside a Range Rover car.

My colleague spotted him standing from the window. He called me and others to see the brand-new Range Rover car. It is worth the money they are making, a true exhibition of the status they are maintaining.

When I saw him beside that flamboyant car, I was hit by the thought of when we were all waiting for our salary two days back.

So they do have that much money to buy a nearly 1.5 crore car, but we have to celebrate our Karwachauth festival without a penny in our pocket.

How can these people even enjoy traveling in such a big car, knowing well that they have not paid so many people?

Even if I work at my present pace of development, I will not be able to own a car like this.

I do not have that stuff and that means running a business like they are and earning enough to own a car like Range Rover.

I guess big car companies like Range Rover or Mercedes should check the character of the person to whom they are selling their car.

I am sure if these expensive car manufacturers will start checking the characteristics of their buyers then they will not be able to sell even a single car.

In this world to earn enough money to purchase a car of over 100 thousand US dollars then it is impossible that that person had not robbed or cheated anyone in their life.

This means owning a car like Mercedes or Range Rover is not an exhibition of status symbol but rather a symbol of how mean you are in your life.

The meaner or the merciless a person will be the bigger the car he or she will have.

At least this is very much true in the Indian scenario. I can bet on anything if any person can prove me wrong on what I have just explained.

Even though it is impossible to be completely true and pure in this world, being rich and affluent mostly means that you must have done something morally wrong at some point.

This moral wrongdoing of a rich person is much more than a poor person who is commuting on a bycycle. 

I guess this is how the world works. If you have to become rich and powerful in this human world, you have to be mean and quite possibly merciless.

You have to be inconsiderate of people’s feelings around you, if you really have to earn an unlimited amount of money.

I did not intend to write what I am just writing, I am myself surprised with the thoughts that are coming to my mind. I sat down with a completely different mind, and now a completely new set of thoughts are coming out.

Now as I am writing about human nature and what are the characteristics of becoming filthy rich, a new thought came to my mind.

I recall a movie made on Steve Jobs. In this time, no one needs to be told who he is, and I myself was inspired by his life and astonished by his unique thinking abilities.

However, in a scene in the movie, it was shown that he left his pregnant wife, just because he was not able to concentrate on his work. He did not want to be just another family man who will be forgotten in time.

He wanted to do something unique and I am sure his work will be remembered for many years to come.

But the fact that, as per what was shown in the movie, he left a pregnant woman just because he did not want to be a family person. So, this means he somewhere lacked moral values.

So, this is what I said, this is how the world works, and that you have to step on something if you want to climb up.

This is what I should be doing if I want to achieve the same objective. 

In the end….

Image is everything. This is why I am writing this article and a multinational company working round the clock. I want to find out values that drive success and the sacrifice one must make to achieve them. Will it be possible that one day, everyone is happy with the other, and that there is no crying face on this planet, particularly no human is inflicting pain on the other.