How many are they, I wonder? – Holmes even didn’t note that asked it aloud.
Whom? Little people? – Prakash tried to make the question clearer. – So they are called here.
In Bombay? –Holmes asked again.
No, in India.
And why are they called so?
Because they don’t exist. It is as though they exist, but from the higher casts’ point of view they are not. It always has been so. They don’t have homes, work or papers. They are counted only in mass in births-and-deaths statistics.
But how much of them are in India?
About thirty percents. Taking into account that India’s population is over a billion, they are more than thirty millions.
It’s the whole Europe! And does nobody struggle for their rights, even they themselves?
They don’t know another life. They are born here, live their time, leave posterity and go to another world. Sometimes, when it’s needed to build something at the place where they lives, a column of trucks come, load them with all their property and take them to another place.
And aren’t they indignant, don’t they protest, don’t they try to change somehow their status?
??? – Prakash looked at Holmes as if he was a child, asking silly questions without an answer. – Please, Mr. Holmes, don’t try to give them something or buy. You will change nothing, but you can get problems.
Well, Prakash, I’ve understood. I’ve been warned of this already in Cairo.
“No, – Holmes was reflecting. – It wasn’t a poverty, which he met in every country. It was something different he didn’t know a word for. And this “something” demanded it’d definition. Holmes accustomed to analyse all that attracted his attention at first time met something new phenomenon. Following the distinction algorithm on the level of “this – not this” he recalled possible analogues, using which he could classify that new that he became a witness of. He remembered Verov’s reasoning that a concept is an image and a word. The word could appear as the familiar image’s consequence. But an adequate image didn’t appear and the occurring words, concerning what he had heard and seen, were empty and dead.
We are at the place, Mr. Holmes, – Prakash interrupted his thoughts about “little people”. – Make yourself comfortable and after two hours I’ll be ready to drive you to local “Ernst & Young” affiliate.
The “Sheraton” hotel in Bombay was quite similar to the hotels of that company in other countries. Situated all over the worlds they were a peculiar symbol of stability and wealth of the West. Services provided by the hotel’s administration also were standard. But in India and so in Bombay there was a problem with water. Europeans were strictly prohibited to use tap water; only water from special packages even for teeth cleaning. Holmes knew it, and remembered the English colonial government who had lived there two centuries before. How did they solve such problems? After all there were no conditioners and water purifier.
The business for which Holmes had come to Bombay was not too easy. The Indian juridical norms only in appearance were similar to the British one. But they let to interpret the certain regulations of bankruptcy in many ways, so they turned a free migration of capital into the one-way flow. The Indian legislature as it was included the deep hidden inner algorithm, surely defending the country’s credit-financial system from foreign intervention. On the second day in Bombay Holmes understood, that he was able to solve only the particular conflict between his firm’s management and the Indian administration. After his departure the global strategy of the Indian government would remain unchanged, and in some time “Ernst & Young’s” activity in this country anyway would become problematic.
Was Holmes a patriot of the firm he represented in different countries? He would hardly answer that he was. He was most likely interested in watching the resistance of national capital of a certain country against the international capital. And he many times caught himself at thoughts that he was far from supporting the last one. From the other side he understood well that the process of concentration the society’s productive forces, called the “globalisation”, was an objective process. It means that it goes in spite of the wishes of individual persons, even the most eminent statesmen. Neither Ehnaton, nor Ramses, nor Julius Caesar, nor Napoleon could stop it. All of them could either slow it down or speed it up. But with all this some conception of ruling this process always exists. Of course it was a subjective one, since in any conception the interests of certain persons are expressed.
But “little people”, as Prakash Kumar had called them, had no opportunity to express their interests in such conception of productive forces concentration and they moreover had no possibility to realize their potential human dignity. So what role did they play in this process?
Again and again Holmes searched for image necessary for classification the new phenomenon while the familiar shots from the film “matrix” hadn’t come back to his memory.
Of course! In this film all the mankind was a source of some specific type of energy for the machine “matrix”, something like batteries for its recharge. If to think clearly the position of the majority of people towards aggregors is the same – they supply aggregors with their energy, necessary for achieving aims of masters and managers of aggregors. Through the special system of “connections” people share their energy with aggregors and through the same “connections” aggregors and their managers influence on all “connected”. Thus all of them in this or that degree don’t dispose of themselves. “Connections” for different people can be different passions and hobbies: from various narcotics, starting with widespread tobacco and alcohol (Holmes himself had such sin), to pop-music. And so in modern mass media (television, radio, papers and magazines) there are all necessary meanings for influence over the “connected”.
It means that the row of terrible images in the “Matrix” is far from fiction and schizophrenic ravings. It’s the visualisation of the quite definite aggregor, which rules the Western regional civilization. And here in India Holmes met with some very old aggregor, for which do the hundreds of millions of “little people” served like “batteries”. And was this their mission? – It seemed that the organizers of the cast system hadn’t provided another mission for them…
Going to domestic airport of Bombay Holmes noted to him that nobody had showed him the “picnics” in India and hadn’t raised the questions like those that he had discussed in Switzerland and Spain. Why was he going to Puttaparthi? Why did he need to talk with Sai Baba? He had no answers to these questions, but probably one that he had given to Harvey as a joke. Though, was it a joke?
The plane had already taken off when Holmes noticed that both cabins were hardly one third full. Prakash Kumar explained that only solvent foreigners fly to the ashram by plane, but the majority of pilgrims travel by train. Nonetheless in Puttaparthi there was the airport of Sai Baba with one runway, and another one was constructing. The weather was fine; there wasn’t a single cloud on the sky and a wonderful view of the Indian Ocean at first and a flat part of the country later opened up before one's eyes. The small clean airport was situated between the hills covered with bright verdure. At one of them there was a crowd of meeting people: cars, cycle-cars – the whole set of services of any big Indian city. Prakash as a man of experience selected the wanted attendant. And then the selected car was let in the airport for taking the passengers and luggage.