There
are so many books that I would like to write about the golden years of Sin City. And many people too will
be writing their books on the same topics with some being the originators of
these fascinating stories. They could even call them autobiographies.
No,
I am not going to write about making my first million in rupiahs. Too many
people have written on that. The very first book that came to mind is ‘How to
run down a profitable and sound public transport system.’ It is not easy, like
they said, when something is running well and smoothly, it will take an
exceptional talent to run it down, or maybe a dud to do it in his best. In the
latter case, it will be so easy with the dud thinking he has really done an
excellent job.
The
second book is likely to be ‘How to run down a vibrant and profitable stock
market singlehandedly.’ This is a much more difficult task to do compare to
running down a train system. To run down a stock market, you must not only have
a list of fictitious but grand money making schemes, but must convince those
people who think they are very smart that the silly schemes you have hatched
are really good. Having a brilliant scheme to convince smart people to go along
is elementary. Convincing smart people with fictitious and destructive schemes
and to have them going along needs the talent of a genius. The only time when
you don’t need a genius is when the smart people are really gullible idiots in
disguise. Then the job will be a piece of cake.
The
third book, this must be more difficult than the above, ‘How to rob the
people’s life savings without them knowing.’ The difficulty of this book is
that in the former two, you only need to convince a few people to believe in
you. That is not difficult when they themselves did not know what is happening
or did not want to know what is happening as long as they can spend time counting
their money. To con all the people in a saving’s scheme is not easy. And it is
not easy to turn a good saving’s scheme into a monster, a life taking scheme
when people have to commit suicide to get their money back.
In
this third book, with millions of people having a vested interest to want to
protect their money, it is not easy to pull wool over their eyes to prevent
them from seeing or knowing what is happening to their money. And you need to
keep doing it everyday and make them believe their money is still there when it
is not there. For the moment they know their money is gone, everything will
fall flat.
My
fourth book, ‘How to sell a country right before the eyes of its people.’ In
terms of difficulty level this must be above all the three books combined. No
one has ever done this in history. Some tried and were killed as traitors.
Actually I am wrong on this. There had been many cases of traitors in the
history of China for conspiring with
foreigner powers. The Ming Dynasty fell because of traitors working with the
enemies outside. The Song Dynasty also had the same fate when an idiotic
general chose to follow orders blindly, without question and refusing to
question, and left his post to allow the enemies to overrun his troops leading
to the fall of a dynasty. But some people honoured such idiots as role models
of blind loyalty to the emperors.
In
modern cities, selling a country is much easier as long as you have a willing
citizenry that would not protest, happy to follow instructions or orders,
willing to believe the leaders, and lost the ability to think and unable to see
when things go wrong. This book is going to be very interesting and would
likely be written by many historians in the future.
Come
to think of it, there are many people more qualified to write such books as
their biographies. It would be instant best sellers, something like ‘kiss and
tell’. Just imagine if the authors
actually engineered the downfall of a public transport system or a stock
exchange and live to tell the stories. Every book is a fertile material for a Hollywood movie.
Kopi Level - Green