A gwala (cattle herder) named Budhi Ram was overseeing his herd in a remote mountainous pasture in Himachal Pradesh when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced towards him out of a cloud of dust. The driver, a young man in a Brioni suit, Gucci shoes, Ray-Ban sunglasses and YSL tie, leaned out of the window and asked the cowboy, “If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, will you give me a calf?” Budhi Ram looked at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looked at his peacefully grazing herd and calmly answered, “Sure, why not?” The yuppie parked his car, whipped out his MacBook Air computer, connected it to his iPhone, and surfed a NASA page on the internet. Then he called up a GPS satellite to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeded into another NASA satellite that scanned the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo. The young man then opened the digital photo in iPhoto and exported it to an image processing facility in Hamburg, Germany. Within seconds, he received an email on his iPhone that the image had been processed and the data stored. He then accessed an MS-SQL database through an ODBC connected Excel spreadsheet with email on his iPhone and, after a few minutes, received a response. Finally, he printed out a full-colour, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturised LaserJet printer. Then he turned to Budhi Ram and said, “You have exactly 1,586 cows and calves.” “Thats right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves,” said Budhi Ram. He watched the young man select one of the animals and looked on with amusement as the young man stuffed it into the trunk of his car. Then Budhi Ram said to the young man, “Hey, if I can tell you exactly who you are and what is your business, will you give me back my calf?” The young man thought about it for a second and then said, “Okay, why not?” “Youre Rahul Gandhi,” said Budhi Ram. “Wow! Thats correct,” says the yuppie idiot, “but how did you guess that?” “No guessing required,” answered Budhi Ram. “You showed up here even though nobody called you. You want to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked. You used millions of dollars worth of equipment trying to show me how much smarter than me you are; and you dont know a thing about how working people make a living – or about cows, for that matter. This is a herd of sheep.” “Now give me back my dog.”
Posted on: Wed, 16 Oct 2013 09:12:15 +0000