14 SOCIAL SCIENTIST and imaginary appetites' bred by 'private property that does not know how to change cruder need into human need.* We in India seem to have no thoughts about 'intermediate technology', the 'small is beautiful' idea, the linking of socialism with the best in our own past. Even Gorbachev's predescessor Andropov had said in 1985 that 'material boons must increase but they should not dominate man, for it is man's spiritual wealth that is truly boundless'. To pursue the gospel of money, as 'democracy's pre-conditions, is to give up all hope for a truly human advance. That would be the end of History with a shimper unworthy of homo sapiens\ In Vol. I of Capital, at the end of the historical chapter Marx cites one Augier's words: 'when money comes into the world it has a congenital bloodrstain on its cheek'. He (Marx) adds that when Capital emerges, 'it drips with blood and dirt from every pore in every limb'. How this is in tune with the Mahabharata's Shaniiparva when Bhishma, wisdom's epitome, tells us: Na Chhitva paramarmani, na kritva Karma dushkaram / Na hatva maisyaghatiyam / prapnoti mahateem shriyam\ ('You cannot achieve great wealth / Big Money / unless you tear the hearts of others, unless you commit wrongs, unless you can kill like the fisherman kills his prey'). Forgive me this long tirade—a cry from the heart of one who wishes, following W.B. Yeats, that 'I may seem / though I die old / A foolish, passionate man'. But do not even the wise among us look around and ask what long ago Wilfrid Owen had said: 'Was it for this / The clay grew tall? / 0, what made fatuous sunbeams toil / To break earth's sleep at all?' Ah, I better shed this Cello-Bengali mood but say quietly that I stay impenitent in my socialist faith, in my confidence that if only little candles can be lit, the sky will once again be aflame. And to make you laugh and forgive my anecdotage, let me say like Graham Greene (whom I admire) telling Cuba's paper Granma around 1982, that if driven to it. It would spend my last days rather in Gulag than in California'.