When the sky is gray and you want to do nothing but watch TV and are confronted by some guy yelling on a show called Big Money. What do you do ? You turn the TV off in disgust, and there you have a thought added to the list of others numbing you.

Taking precedence given that the end of the month is upon me, I cannot help but wonder as to how 'Big' money is to me. Big it might not be, but painfully consequential in this 'adult leg' of my otherwise infantile journey. The reason I say infantile is because I have not been able to erode the naivety and small pleasures that defined my innocent childhood. Given my graying hair this world view may well be construed as being hedonistic, well I disagree and look at life through the same kaleidoscopic lens that makes life utterly exciting and adventuresome. If you haven't by now figured out the essence of this monologue, you haven't been a poor graduate student in your life.

I don't know what will become of this 'highly educated' graduate in the years to come. What I certainly do hope is that I'd be able to nurture back what little humanity is left, to make some meaning in this otherwise meaningless journey. A journey rallied by harnessing the weakest of human traits. I really don't know and may never know what the true 'utility' of money is in my life or for that matter in any human life. What I very well know is that it could become meaningless if for one second we step into shoes of the desperate, hungry and the poor.

Life may well be a game of Monopoly, I'd spend money doing things I love and sit by the sidelines and than become boringly actuarial. There is no better way to realize that your instincts are against billions of years of evolution than get a PhD in biology and ironically label yourself a Darwinian failure in the end. I would count myself incredibly rich if by the last day of my life I learn to be humble, forgive without debate, maintain peace within in the most tempestuous of times. So how rich am I ? I would never know !

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