“Dad? Is that you dad? I don’t feel well, I can’t move dad, I feel so weak! Am I going to die like mum?”
“It’s ok son, I’m here, I just got back. Don’t worry, you won’t die, not now, I have brought our friend the doctor, he’s going to give you some new medicine, you’ll start feeling better very soon, my son.”
Feeling the young boy’s forehead, Rajesh’s friend and doctor shone a light in his eyes and felt his pulse in the small darkened room in another makeshift house in a New Delhi slum, one of hundreds of thousands of other hastily built dwellings now found in so many cities throughout the world. He smiled to the young 6 year old lying down on his small mattress, telling him he was going to add some new medication through the drip in his arm, it would just feel a little bit cold but then with the help of the drug in his body he would quickly start to feel better, a lot better. He may feel drowsy and would probably go to sleep for a while, but would then wake up in the morning and be able to go and play with his friends again, all would be well. The young doctor had a warm smile and a reassuring voice that put the young boy at ease.
Glancing towards Rajesh, the doctor shook his head in an almost imperceptible manner, dropped his gaze, and Rajesh knew. He came by the bedside and held his son’s hand, smiling into his eyes, holding back tears and unable to say anything beyond “I love you my son”.
That Sunday evening at the very beginning of 2024, Rajesh, a bright young mathematician living in a New Delhi slum, had a dying son. He would also soon do something extraordinary that would change not just his own life, not just the life of every human being on earth, but something that would forever change life on Earth itself.
His employer on the outskirts of the slums was a think tank specializing in solving complex problems for mostly rich businessmen from the West. That week, starting the very next morning, Rajesh was going to be part of a team in charge of developing the Oscillating economy equations. A grand scheme that would start a new period of obscene wealth creation for a select few. In fact it was commissioned by men who were already the richest people on the planet, a select group that would regularly meet in the shiny town of Davos in Switzerland, to basically plan how to become ever richer.
The best minds in the world, the most gifted mathematicians, could be picked from a country of a billion and a half, and could still be paid a pittance by those Davos Boys. Everyone was being squeezed out of every job in every corner of the globe in the mad scramble to make the rich richer and the poor poorer, as dictated by the corporate world and its rules. If you weren’t born a white boy in a rich family, there was a good chance you would die without a penny. Rajesh’s son was dying in poverty and he was just six years old. Their wife and mother died a week before from cholera, contracted in the game of Russian roulette that you played every day when living in the slums of New Delhi.
Tomorrow morning, Rajesh would be picked up to work on the Oscillating economy equations, having stayed home the previous three weeks, waiting for work to come. Stable work was a long lost luxury in the new world. In the past week, he had also been trying to help his wife who had fallen ill; she was one of the first casualties of the cholera outbreak that had been spreading like wildfire since the start of the year in the Indian megacity. This week
Rajesh had then tried to care for his son who had also contracted the disease. He had managed to purchase some antibiotics using money from a loan shark after he could show he had secured a temporary contract. But it was all too late. His wife was already dead, now his son’s organs were failing despite the antibiotics which simply came in too late, and he would die in just a few hours. Rajesh stayed with his son until the very end, holding his hand by the bedside, until the morphine he had bought by pawning the remainder of his future salary and which his doctor friend had just injected through the drip had set him free almost peacefully, just as the sun was setting on the city.
The very next day, Rajesh would report at the headquarters of the think tank, as instructed by the temp work recruiter who would get a quarter of his pittance. He hadn’t told the medication supplier about his recruiter’s commission, meaning he would be short of 25% of his dues at the end of his week-long contract. The day after he finished working, Rajesh would also likely be dead, unable to pay the last quarter of the cost of antibiotics and a morphine shot that had not saved his son but had let him die with a minimum of suffering. Rajesh had a few hours left to mourn his son, if he wasn’t at the think tank headquarters the next day, he would be replaced, what little chances he had of being employed again would be extinguished, and he would be dead anyway in a few days, killed over a few dollars worth of debt, the going rate for life these days in the slums of New Delhi.
His choice was simple, he could choose to do nothing, stay at home and die, or he could go to work for the week, then die. In the slums he would struggle to find food for the next few days, going to sleep where his whole family had just passed away. If he chose to stay home and not go to work in the morning, the man who supplied him with the drugs would find out, he would come for him to collect his dues, and would have to kill him when he couldn’t make good on that promise to repay. Or Rajesh could go to work to earn his dues. There he would be fed for a few days and he would sleep in a trundle bed in a room with 20 others, away from the slums and the painful memories of the past two weeks. The end result would be the same, when his supplier would come, he would be short of 25%. Another message to send: don’t renege on a promise to pay back, in full, and on time. Simply another death in the slums.
But maybe, just maybe, there was another choice. As he started the evening mourning his son alone in the small room of the anonymous ramshackle slum house, beyond the immense grief brought about by the complete collapse of his world, Rajesh could sense a need, an urge that would build over the course of that sleepless night. By the time the sun broke through the megacity haze, that urge had become irrepressible, a focal point that had cleared away the confusion of the past few hours, Rajesh had come up with a third possibility, another choice.
Clocking in to work in the morning as scheduled, Rajesh entered the building under the eye of his recruiter and reported to the headquarters for duty. To everyone who knew and saw him that morning, he seemed in high spirits, the usual cheerful Rajesh, maybe looking just a bit tired. But he hadn’t come that morning for the work, he wasn’t there for the money either, he wasn’t there for the food or the comfortable bed or the clean walls, he wasn’t even there just so he could get away from his pain.
He wasn’t there to blow himself up either as a futile attempt to shed light on the plight of his kind. That would have just meant a slight setback and the contract with the group of rich people from the West being awarded to the next think tank firm on