So I've seen this photo floating around the Internet a lot and it was thought-provoking. It's just that, the thoughts that sprang in my mind were a bit different.
I've always believed that while life gives you many opportunities to learn many new things from people around you, whether they are actively a part of your life or not, you learn only as much as you choose to learn. And while even if you assumed that people work towards your success or development, it's a stretch of the imagination to assume that if you hadn't done the things that need to get done, you'd never get anywhere. This post confuses being grateful to your mentors with believing that man does not journey alone. Because in fact, man does journey all alone. He steers his own ship and makes his own choices. Sure others may factor into those choices but rarely can two people achieve the same outcome with the same set of people guiding them.
To trivialise the lack of money or poverty by saying the rich man is stereotypically unhappy or has unfulfilled emotional needs just because of his ability to buy more expensive services is churlish and shallow. Similarly no amount of drinking tapri chai is going to bring joy to someone who is oppressed by poverty. How antithetical it is then that one of the richest men in the country uses his platform to express ill-formed thoughts as advice to impressionable youth. I'm not aware of the veracity of the attribution to Ratan Tata and I haven't done any fact-checking and it may well be that an Internet troll has put out this wrongful attribution.
It may seem that my response is to the semantics of the text but to convey such an important message in such a casual manner that leaves the essence open to interpretation is irresponsible.
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