Page 50 - Insight 2018

HOW MUCH

LAND DOES A

MANNEED?

Dr. Irfan Zafar

(Senior Manager, Training)

One of the attributes that stands out as far as our generation fortune. Finally, after buying and selling a lot of fertile land,
is concerned is to get a hold of as much land as possible and he was introduced to very simple-minded people who owned
that too in the shortest period of time. Additionally, this lust is a huge amount of land. In an attempt to take as much of their
not just restricted to our time on earth, it goes much further, land as possible, at the lowest negotiable price, he decided to
involving our next generations. Somehow, we tend to ensure approach them.
material prosperity for the generations to come. If you were to However, their offer came out to be very unusual. Pakhom was
pick up any category of human beings inhibiting this land of told that for a sum of one thousand roubles, he should walk
the pure (read impure), you would f nd this greed manifesting around as large an area as he wants, starting at daybreak.
itself in so many pathetic ways.
If he were to reach the starting point by sunset that same
The galore of housing societies and authorities cropping up day, the entire area of land his route enclosed would be his.
every other day is a manifestation of the ever-rising demand However, if he were to fail in reaching his starting point, he
for constructing a “house” (home would lose his money and receive no
is a totally different ball game), THE REAL QUESTIONS WE NEED TO land. Thinking that he had chanced
thus bringing the much needed ASK OURSELVES ARE; HOW MUCH upon a bargain of a lifetime, Pakhom
“peace” of mind to its owners. set out on his journey at daybreak
The land maf a in its zeal to grab CAN WE TAKE WITH US AND HOW trying to cover the maximum land in the
every inch of land possible has MUCH WILL BE LEFT BEHIND? process. However as time passed by,
not even spared the graveyards. It he soon realised that he was far from
has been reported that they now plan to offer “compensation” the starting point and so he ran back as fast as he could to the
to the relatives of the departed ones if they allow them to awaiting villagers. He was able to make it to the starting point,
f atten the graves into a cushy plot. This sends out a clear just in the nick of time when the sun set. However, he became
message that nobody cares about the departed souls who extremely exhausted from the run and dropped to his demise,
have left this world to f nd “eternal” peace. after which his servant buried him in an ordinary grave, which
was only six feet long. In the end, like Pakhom, we will only
This brings us to the most pertinent question that is; how need six feet of land to be buried inside.
much land does a man need? Leo Tolstoy (a Russian writer),
is the one who came up with a brilliant piece of writing, The real questions we need to ask ourselves are; how much
which, if understood, can change one’s understanding of life can we take with us and how much will be left behind? Lying
forever. However, for that to happen, our generation needs on our deathbeds, what do we really need? Is it the acres of
to “read”; an attribute we lost a long time back, and which land acquired, the monetary things in life or would we want to
has now been replaced by “poetic” short message service. hold on to something else? Is it ‘peace’ or the ‘piece’ of land
The protagonist of the story is a peasant named Pakhom, we are after? One thing we all must be sure of is that nothing
whose wife complains that they do not own enough land to physical will accompany us on our journey towards the inf nity.
satisfy their needs. Hence, he moves to larger areas of land at
other locations where he could grow more crops and amass

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