Two Sides of the Coin

Recently, I was asked the question: what do you do for a living? I told the half-truth: I have retired. Today, I thought of coming clean. I will briefly tell you about my business. If you read till the end, there is a prize to be won (t&c apply, not tlc).

What is my business? It is called ‘Two Sides of the Coin’ (click here for a homepage) – we offer the better alternative. The business is best explained with examples.

First, consider politics. We get 40% of our revenue from politics. Every politician wants to have an own group. Language, religion, race and ethnicity are so easily exhausted. Think of the many permutations and combinations. Here, our task is to make today’s bhumiputr tomorrow’s foreigner.

Even ruffians and anarchists want to be divided and subdivided. Go to any street-corner and look at the goondas hanging around in spotless white or saffron or green or chic red or dull khaki and the way they mix and match.

Those are our customers - we give them an identity, the USP and a life-long mission. And, we do it for a modest fee. Given the volume of business, the pennies will do.

Second, consider religion. I have a sentimental attachment to this – I started my business with this. When I started, I had only one guru to follow – history. It is still really hot.

In politics, everything is transparent and people know the truth. But with religion, the work has to be clandestine and involves a great deal of subterfuge. There is very little to be made with inter-religious divisions. That is so obvious, isn’t it? We make money from creating intra-religious divisions and in this advanced age, it is the sub-divisions that really sell. Split and split again.

If a caste or sub-caste involves people who used to tap coconut trees for toddy, divide them into groups based on whether they were the first or the second to come down the coconut tree, i.e., to leave their ‘ancestral’ occupation.

If your group consists of people who landed by ship from some other land, differentiate between those who came on the deck and those who were in the first-class cabins. Irrespective of whether you are an upper-caste or a lower-caste, we will help you find your own group.

We help even atheists find their ‘special’ group: the rationalists, the ones who say I-went-to-space-and-did-not-see-God, the tricky kind with is-there-God-is-a-non-question and so on.

Even those who fight against the caste-system come to us and we give each group a meaningful identity, for e.g. the against-caste-but-against-reservation group who are not keen about every dog having its day, the against-caste-but-want-benefits-based-on-caste group and so on.

I have been asked the question: why do you say ‘two sides’ when there seem to be many sides? Everyone wants the other side to be the side. Just another side will not sell.

Some try to challenge us by bringing in emotions and concepts like love, altruism, jealousy, patriotism and so on. We do not deal with love but if it is love marriage, then it is an institution ready for our attention. Even lovers like to have their own elite group and we help in creating the group that they desire. The same idea holds good with the other concepts.

Most of our business is based on groups and institutions. We rarely deal with individuals. But, recently, we had a client with the following requirement: his wife wanted at least two persons as her husband. We gave him multiple personality – with different styles, techniques and even philosophy of life. We even allowed for spontaneity.

Divide and rule, that is our mission.

If you have reached so far, there is only one question in your mind – what is the prize?

The prize is: anything you want!

To get the prize, just answer the following (only the winners will get a response) and the gift is yours:

Name a group which cannot be divided?



Author’s note: This is to celebrate tomorrow’s Bharat Bandh – if I am to believe the newspapers, normal life will be paralyzed from midnight to midnight and the government has endorsed it.