Mohsin Hamid - How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

So the pretty girl discovers that you are a father, the juxtaposition ironic, in a way, though she never desired children, for she has recently entered menopause, and also that your business is flourishing, and further that you continue to have a sexy little something about you, a rustic manliness, a touch of the uncouth, a hip-shaking coarseness common to people from your inland backwater, and so filthily hot and lacking around here. She smiles at this description and asks for more, but decides against divulging the details of her shared past with you, if for no other reason than that she has not discussed it with anyone before, and after all these years it seems unnatural to start. She says only that you and she had a thing, once upon a time.

She herself is tolerably content. Her transition from television chef to designer-kitchen showroom owner to retailer of one-of-a-kind international furniture and expensive bric-a-brac has not been without its moments of difficulty. But now her establishment is humming along nicely, she has an excellent assistant, a well-educated and divorced woman free to accompany and translate for her on her lengthy travels abroad, travels the pretty girl enjoys, seeing them as adventures, and as for her romantic entanglements, well, they may not have been especially fiery of late, but at least they do persist.

As she speaks of you with the freight forwarder, watching two traditionally clad waiters struggle to reposition a massive orchid sculpted of ice, you too are watching men toil away, standing at the construction site of your water-mining plant with your brother-in-law at your side. Despite the modest size of your project, he has had hard hats issued to your employees, an innovation you value because it adds a veneer of professionalism. Your scalp sweats under this plastic second skull, the sun bearing down mercilessly, and rivulets of perspiration sting your eyes and stroke saltily the corners of your mouth.

Below your feet is the ever-dropping aquifer, punctured by thousands upon thousands of greedily sipping machine-powered steel straws. Your installation is not the largest of its kind, but it is brighter than most others, shiny and pristine and new. Yet, standing there, for an instant you catch a whiff of something quite inexplicable, or at least you think you do, a scalding breeze carrying to your nose the blood-like aroma of rust.

Today your wife will doubtless be intervening with her women’s group to help another beaten spouse or homeless divorcee or disinherited widow, actions that are all for the good and have nothing to do with you, but contain a degree of implicit reproach. You shut your eyes, briefly seized by a strange regret, maybe for the delays to this project, or for the state of your marriage, or for becoming so late a father to your son, for being, in all likelihood, destined to overlap too limitedly with the span of his life. But the mood passes. You master yourself, spit a clot of parched sputum into the dirt, and carry on, exhorting your welding crew to make good time.

WE’RE ALL INFORMATION, ALL OF US, WHETHER readers or writers, you or I. The DNA in our cells, the bioelectric currents in our nerves, the chemical emotions in our brains, the configurations of atoms within us and of subatomic particles within them, the galaxies and whirling constellations we perceive not only when looking outward but also when looking in, it’s all, every last bit and byte of it, information.

Now, whether all this information seeks to comprehend itself, whether that is the ultimate goal to which our universe trends, we obviously don’t yet know for certain, though the fact that we humans have evolved, we forms of information capable of ever-increasing understandings of information, suggests it might be the case.

What we do know is that information is power. And so information has become central to war, that most naked of our means by which power is sought. In modern combat, the fighter pilot, racing high above the earth at twice the speed of sound, absorbs different streams of information with each eye, radar reflections and heat signatures with one, say, and the glint of sunlight on distant metal with the other, a feat requiring years of retraining of the mind and sensory organs, a painstaking human rewiring, or upgrade, if you will, while on the ground the general sees his and disparate other contemporary narratives play out simultaneously, indeed as the emerging-market equity trader does, and as the rapid-fire TV remote user and the multiple-computer-window opener do, all of us learning to combine this information, to find patterns in it, inevitably to look for ourselves in it, to reassemble out of the present-time stories of numerous others the lifelong story of a plausible unitary self.

Perhaps no one does this with more single-minded dedication or curatorial ferocity than those at the apex of organizations entrusted with national security. These artists of war are active even when their societies are officially at peace, quests for power being unrelenting, and in the absence of open hostilities they can be found either hunting for ever-present enemies within or otherwise divvying up that booty always conveniently proximate to those capable of wanton slaughter, spoils these days often cloaked in purchasing contracts and share-price movements. To partner in such ventures is to be invited to ride the great armor-plated, signal-jamming, depleted-uranium-firing helicopter gunship to wealth, and so it is only natural that you are at this moment considering clambering aboard.

From the perspective of the world’s national security apparatuses you exist in several locations. You appear on property and income-tax registries, on passport and ID card databases. You show up on passenger manifests and telephone logs. You hum inside electromagnetically shielded military-intelligence servers and, deep below pristine fields and forbidding mountains, on their dedicated backups. You are fingertip swirls, facial ratios, dental records, voice patterns, spending trails, e-mail threads. And you are one of a pair of suited figures seated in the rear of a luxury automobile now approaching a combat-uniformed MP at an entry checkpoint to your city’s cantonment.

This MP has only seconds to determine which vehicles to pull aside for his unit to search. Trucks, buses, and those cars that have three or more exclusively male passengers under the age of fifty are mandatorily inspected. For all others he relies on instinct and also on randomness, predictability being a fatal flaw in any defensive system. He decidedly does not like the looks of you. Wealthy civilians, in his view, are a subcategory of thief. They have robbed this country blind for generations. But wealthy civilians are also likely to have contacts with generals, and so they stand partly outside the otherwise clear five-tier hierarchy of officer, NCO, enlisted man, loyal citizen, enemy. His eyes scan your expression, taking in your calm air of control, and the expressions of your colleague and of your driver. He waves you through.

A series of CCTV cameras observes various stages of your progress through the cantonment. Through their monochromatic optical sensors the expensive metallic finish of your sedan dulls to a ratty gray. Behind you are scenes little changed since independence, images of well-manicured lawns, mess halls with regimental insignia, trees painted waist-high in skirts of white. Homes of the descendants of corps and division commanders abut those of oligarchic commercial magnates, and everywhere is a sense of unyielding order and arboreal grace increasingly atypical of your city, much of the rest of which seethes outside this fortified garrison enclave like some great migratory horde besieging a royal castle.