ALL THAT IS GOLD DOES NOT GLITTER
Are wishes and manias the same? When a man gets his hands on the legendary Philosophers’ Stone can he tell if it is the best or worst thing to happen to him? The magic of magical stories like Parash Pathar is that they allow us to live out these fantasies and also exercise our powers of foresight. We can identify or dissociate ourselves from the protagonist and wonder how things would turn out if we were in their place.
For Satyajit Ray, making this film would have been an act of wish-fulfilment also, albeit one that he had to enact in real life. Coming off the success of his first two films (Pather Panchali and Aparajito) this film would have tested his ability to tell a radically different form of story with a very different filmmaker’s toolset. He certainly didn’t disappoint his viewers because even this light-hearted venture has enough depth for him to display his profound sensibilities.
WYSIWYG?
The most obvious comment the film makes, and it doesn’t claim to be original, is that sudden riches often bring unexpected perils. After an initial phase of giddy delight, the enriched person soon finds life is much harder after the windfall.
The reason this happens is not because the riches are cursed or that they are somehow inherently evil, but because the deserving candidate for this windfall is also, by their very nature, ill-equipped to handle it. Paresh, the portly man nearing retirement, does not have the qualities of shrewdness, business-savvy, weaponised paranoia, or even plain greed, that are needed to sit atop a mountain of gold and keep it secret.
His first encounters with the alchemist’s stone is a mixture of fear and excitement, expressed in child-like manner. He hides like a child trying to hide from his parents, and then giggles like one who has just been surprised with sweets. It’s a purer state of expression, one that doesn’t speculate but just accepts something as is.
He likes to take part in the neighbour kid’s games, because at heart he is a kid himself. There is little to no malice in him. Instead he is full of bewilderment. Now, certainly these qualities are there for comic effect, but they also contain truth. A man with a simple career, modest family life, no big aspirations, can be tickled by this sudden power, but cannot fathom harnessing it. That is a job for the businessman, Kachalu. He knows how to control wealth, and would be better at it. He is forged for the business world, unlike Paresh.
A windfall can reveal facets of one’s character that they themselves may not be aware of. There is a thought experiment that goes like this – if you cannot choose between two objects, toss a coin, and irrespective of what the coin says your heart will reveal its desire to you. In other words, if you’re happy with the outcome it shows what you wanted all along, and if you feel regret at the outcome, even if earlier you couldn’t make a decision, you know which object you really desired all along.
A windfall is such a game of chance. The power to turn whatever you want into gold, hence infinite wealth, will tell you how much of what you want can be bought with that wealth, and how much you are forced to lose in order to maintain that wealth. It will reveal who your friends are (who leaves you, and who seeks you out). It will reveal what your spouse or child thinks of you (do they like the more glittering version of you). It will reveal what your enemies think of you (they may invite you to cocktail parties, or throw you out of them). And it will reveal what you think of yourself. When power corrupts, you know your true worth.
On Grand Speculation
While the lucky man or woman may get to know their own true worth, what does the world learn about the worth of the newfound riches? What happens to the society and economy that we’ve created when gold, suddenly, comes in infinite supply?
As per this film, it leads to wild losses across all sections of society, who had stored various quantities of gold as an investment. Both rich and poor are devastated because gold has been, along with property, a civilizational storehouse of wealth. Never did anyone expect it to lose its value by miraculously becoming plentiful.
And that’s where our understanding of value gets a hit. Is gold valuable only because it is rare?
Scientific estimates say that there is under 200,000 tonnes of gold in the world (as of current knowledge). That is the reason why it was used as currency for the longest time. Even now many families choose to lock up their wealth in incremental pieces of gold just because its rarity ensures profit. And when that rarity is gone, well, you know the rest.
But do we stop and wonder whether gold has any other value to us? After all, it is a malleable metal which is used in many electronics. Again, as per estimates, 50% of gold is used for jewellery, 40% for investments, and 10% for industry. A flood of gold in the market would affect the investment segment adversely, but it would benefit the first and third segment very positively. After all, we have always thought of gold as a very beautiful metal because of its colour and lustre. Does that change when there is more of it or were we fooling ourselves? Do we not want others to also have something so beautiful?
There are many things that aren’t rare but are still very valuable, like air. Why is it that we base so much of our lives on things whose only value to us is its rareness? That’s like crying over falling property prices when the Earth becomes uninhabitable and humans settle another planet. At least to an impractical idealist like me, that sounds topsy-turvy.
Certainly, one has sympathy for those who stand to lose because of the intervention of something magical like the Parash Pathar. But had we not treated gold like a magical metal, then a magical stone couldn’t have caught us all off-guard.
There are many things we value for their rarity – gold, diamonds, mink coats, fossil fuels, custom cars, royalty, and so on. The things we should really value are those that are, or should be abundant – food, health, love, education, music, air, water, common sense, to name a few.
Competent Authority
While markets are expected to assign value to products like gold, who are the people who assign value to human beings? The elite team of politicians, bureaucrats, police, and social and religious leaders, have assigned this role to themselves. Of course, given that we are mostly citizens of democratic nations, the implication is that these organs are chosen by the people themselves. Alas, the truth is not quite as straightforward.
When Paresh and his wife are picked up by the Police, acting on the news leaked by the malcontent Kachalu, they are determined to get to the bottom of the matter. This is fine policing except that there is very little investigation or evidence involved. One may say that this is a comic film, after all, and Policemen don’t act this negligently in the real world. But, don’t they?
All humans nurture biases and all arms of the state machinery are made of humans. So it is natural, even if reprehensible in many cases, that they act on their biases. There is nothing about men and women in administration that elevates them above the morass of the masses.
The first duty of the Police is to preserve order. Once again, that is a fine thing to do. But, where there is lack of clarity is what does order mean and how do we recognise it? Order can mean maintaining the peace, but it can also mean shutting down protests. Order can mean protecting the weak, but it can also mean protecting the powerful against the weak. Sometimes plugging your ears can make the world seem very peaceful. Is that order?
When these men in uniform try to get Paresh to confess to being a smuggler they are trying to get answers. But if the answers are coerced or false, then do we have the fullest discharge of law? Moreover, they seem very invested in maintaining the status quo of gold, which could be said to be another example of maintaining order. But, like I mentioned above, does maintaining the value of gold not come at the expense of the usage of gold for electronics and high-performance vehicles? It can be said that restricting the availability of gold can cost a lot in terms of innovation that could benefit millions. So instead of pursuing justice, the system may sidestep it altogether in favour of the status quo.
Humans are wonderfully gifted creatures of this planet with large reserves of empathy and long-sightedness. These gifts can be easily maintained and multiplied by our societies, and grown in value as they become more abundant. And yet it appears like we are determined to restrict the supply of these qualities as we go on chasing objectives of questionable value which only appear to bless us with bounty. The kind of unbridled power and monomania we chase after is almost certain to cause us more grief than joy in the long run. A simple man like Paresh realises that living with such stress and paranoia can make even wealth seem so empty that he wants to return to the comfort of his simpler life – his audience should also see what he sees.