A gwala (cattle herder)
named Budhi Ram was overseeing his herd in a remote mountainous pasture
in Himachal when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced toward him out of a
cloud of dust.
The driver, a young man in a
Brioni suit, Gucci shoes, RayBan sunglasses and YSL tie, leaned out the
window and asked the cowboy, "If I tell you exactly how many cows and
calves you have in your herd, Will you give me a calf?"
Budhi Ram looks at the
man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing herd and
calmly answers, "Sure, Why not?"
The yuppie parks his car,
whips out his macBook Air computer, connects it to his iphone, and surfs
to a NASApage on the Internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite to get
an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA
satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution
photo.
The young man then opens the
digital photo in iPhoto and exports it to an image processing facility
in Hamburg , Germany
.
Within seconds, he receives
an email on his iPhone that the image has been processed and the data
stored. He then accesses an MS-SQL database through an ODBC connected
Excel spreadsheet with email on his iPhone and, after a few minutes,
receives a response.
Finally, he prints out a
full-color, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized LaserJet
printer, turns to Budhi Ramy and says, "You have exactly 1,586 cows and
calves."
"That's right. Well, I guess
you can take one of my calves," says Budhi-
Ram.
He watches the young man
select one of the animals and looks on with amusement as the young man
stuffs it into the trunk of his
car.
Then Budhi Ram says to
the young man, "Hey, if I can tell you exactly who you are & what is
your business , will you give me back my
calf?"
The young man thinks about
it for a second and then says, "Okay, why
not?"
"You're Rahul Gandhi,
says Budhi- Ram.
"Wow! That's correct," says
the yuppie idiot, "but how did you guess
that?"
"No guessing required."
answered Budhi Ram. "You showed up here even though nobody called you;
you want to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never
asked. You used millions of dollars worth of equipment trying to show me
how much smarter than me you are; and you don't know a thing about how
working people make a living - or about cows, for that matter.
This is a herd of sheep. ...
Now give me back my
dog.