(Disclaimer: The following piece is a collection of badly strung sentences and ideas connected by defective logic. Consumption of the same has been proved to cause brain cancer in flea-infested bandicoots, and could have the same effects on you too!!! Owing to its defective content and rambling style, it is inappropriate for viewing by anybody)

The Free rider

One of the chief advantages of being a free rider (apart from living longer and happier) is that you are naturally endowed with modesty. Simply because, by definition, a free rider would wait for someone else to praise and glorify him, being above such menial exertions. Having wasted the past few hours in pointless pursuit of understanding financial derivatives, I am glad to apply myself to that very worthy purpose – the glorification of the free rider. Several of us would have, at several points in life crossed paths (and occasionally swords) with members of this exclusive cult. Some of us would have even been as daringly audacious as to attempt free riding ourselves. But if there is a genuine born free rider among my audience, I begin this piece with salutations to him.

One defining feature of the majority of the population is that it has extremely strong views on things that can do nothing about. For instance, if you question a gentleman from the salaried class, he would have powerful reasons favouring his manager facing a squad of tribal warriors with poison tipped spears, but absolutely no opinion on the choice of toilet acid, though he clearly has control only on the second. Similarly, though the free riders are a high and unreachable class, the majority of the ignorant population has powerful views on them. Many would favour a pogrom to eradicate the free riders though they have a better chance of time traveling and making out with Marilyn Munroe. But before deciding what to do with these people, it is important to understand how their minds work (if at all they work).

Being faithful to a systematic dissection, free riders fall into three groups –

(1) The pseudo free riders – these individuals are something like chimps imitating men. They do not have free rider blood in their veins but try vainly imitating them with “cool”, “unconcerned” and “don’t-give-a-damn” attitudes.
However, they fail the panic test – when the stakes become too large, they betray their simian roots by scurrying about like scared idiots.

(2) The pretenders – the members of this class are something like men imitating chimps. Yellow livered at the prospects of a free rider witch hunt, they pretend to be busy and involved in work though they never do any.

(3) The real free riders – an extremely rare class of people who royally free ride without putting any pretense of work. They are frequently also philosophers and romantics who wait for others to come and clean up their bowels after a crap. The reason for them being rare is that they are frequently killed by the ignorant public.

There is a complaint that the free riders have been created thanks to the modern ills of “teamwork” and “corporate culture”. However, if we look back we can find that free riding has actually been much more ancient than one is inclined to suspect. There have been Vedic references to free riding. The Ramayana for instance is a rich repository of free riders, Vibishna and Sugriva being two of the foremost. While the former effortlessly switched from the loser Rakshasa side to the winners and claimed the throne after the messy bloodbath was over, the latter spent his time drinking brewed beer and letching with unsuspecting Vanara maidens while his troops were swatting mosquitoes in the swamps of Sri Lanka.

Coming to the present day, apart from “smartsizing” and “reorgs”, free riders have been the target of general ire. It’s puzzling to see why. Actually, no one could possibly have a complaint against these immortals. The apparent reasons for the public ire are that “there can be no free lunch” and that everyone must work for his share of the pie.

But, on a little thought, one can see the fallacy of this argument. Consider life from the perspective of a donkey, it comes to most people more easily than one would suspect. To the donkey, the master might seem to be a massive free rider, but the fact is simply that the master is cleverer. This analogy, apart from being hideously stupid, is immensely insightful and leads us to my theory (made entirely from such analogies). It goes like this…

If one looks at the evolution of life, it has been a progression of life forms in increasing complexity. This is essential as the resources are limited, and successful species somehow take advantage of existing dumb ones. For instance, we put the bull, the horse and the dog to hard work. It is easy to imagine the cro mangon man convincing the primitive horse to carry his ass on its back with baboon logic and a heavy cudgel. Every successful species free rides into dominance by extracting work from other helpless and dim-witted creatures.

Applying this framework to the present day, it is clear that the free riders of today will become the ruling class of tomorrow. Normal people might childishly protest that free riders survive solely on the goodwill and sympathy of other people, but apparently scientists have found that pack mules in Afghanistan too claim the same about humans. I can envisage a bright tomorrow where free riders will be in charge of everything. However, that would never be apparent to the poor working class, as the rulers would be too tired to officially show their authority. Coming to think of it, it is very much possible that we are ruled by free riders already. So while professors are predicting that computers will take over humanity, it is actually the superior free rider species that has displaced the rest of humanity. You might object on the grounds that physically, free riders are no different from other humans, but I bet the prehistoric orangutan felt the same about the Neanderthal man before it was clubbed on the head and cooked for dinner.

These logical reasons apart, there is a very powerful indefinable appeal in a true-blooded free rider. It is said that the gods were defined by their unperturbed nature. If that is true, a free rider is no lesser than a god. Deadlines and problems just go whooshing past him as he jaywalks through life, effortlessly redirecting the anvils aimed at his head towards vacant skulls in the vicinity. He looks at you with dreamy eyes of one who knows the truth and agrees to whatever you say, and you close your eyes in triumph of having conquered him. But when you open them, you are alone, like a dung beetle on your task looming like a pile of elephant crap, and he has vanished whistling into the fragrant thin air.