In Sly Self-Help Novel, Selling Clean Water Gets You 'Filthy Rich'

Transcript

RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

The man we'll talk about next is in the center of one of the most important trends in recent times. It's the economic rise of Asian nations.

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

This man is the main character of "How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia," which is a much-praised new novel by the Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid. Hamid tells the story of a poor boy from a rural village painfully aware of his country's new wealth and of his own family's poverty.

MOHSIN HAMID: Those two things, the carrot and stick, are beating people along this trajectory of trying desperately to move up in the world.

INSKEEP: Mohsin Hamid tells his main character's life story in the form of a self-help book. He details your rise in a harsh environment: get an education, avoid idealists, be prepared to use violence. Don't fall in love.

HAMID: It started off as a joke. I was in New York, talking with a friend of mine, and we started joking about the idea that sometimes, reading novels felt like hard work, and we were doing it because they were good for us. And I said, oh, well, you know, I'm going to write my next novel as a self-help book.

And I tried to forget that, but it had triggered this notion that, you know, maybe novels really are self-help books. And maybe writing a novel is sort of self-help for me, being more comfortable with my life and the world. And maybe there's a kind of self-help in reading fiction, too.

INSKEEP: And, of course, you're ending up writing about the kind of guy who might reach for a self-help book if he saw one in a store somewhere. He's an aspiring young man who's trying to go from nothing to great riches.

HAMID: Exactly. The main character could very well be the reader of the book.

INSKEEP: OK. So talk me through this. You tell me that if I want to succeed in rising Asia, first I have to be a small child, sick, underneath my mother's cot on the dirt floor of some cottage in a rural, unnamed country. What are some of the things that I must do next?

HAMID: The story of this guy who is the model for the self-help book takes you from the village - because right now, there are billions of people who are migrating from the world's villages and countryside into the world's big cities. And people are doing that for a reason. They're doing it because the rural economy all over the world is collapsing.

Farmers and people who make a living from the land are finding it impossible to survive. So the first step is to get out of that place, come to the city where there are opportunities. And the next step is, in the city, you need an education. And then there's a whole series of steps, basically, that take this character as he grows up and becomes a man, to basically realize you need to be a really hard-nosed, cunning entrepreneur to make it.

INSKEEP: Would you describe for people the business that your main character settles on?

HAMID: He figures out - by working for a very cunning guy who takes expired canned goods and resells them after rewriting the expiry dates on them, so they look like they haven't expired - that there's all sorts of niches the market doesn't service very well. And what's happening in much of the world right now is that there's a water crisis. There's not enough clean drinking water available. So our hero decides that he should get into this water business. And the first step for that for him is to begin to boil tap water, put it inside mineral water bottles and sell it to, you know, unsuspecting restaurants and wealthier people.

INSKEEP: And in fairness, you do say that he tries to generally boil it for maybe five minutes. So...

HAMID: Yeah, he's doing - you know, he realizes that - he's a service provider in the economy, and he realizes that his fakes should be of a decent standard.

INSKEEP: You've chosen something that is really at the heart of economic growth right now.

HAMID: It's at the heart of economic growth. It's also at the heart of how our world is being marketized. Because things that we used to take for granted - water, for example, was almost free for a long time. And now, suddenly, it is having a price put on it. It's becoming a giant market. So that area, a former public domain that's now becoming a huge, contested economic activity, is where he decides to fight his economic fight.

INSKEEP: Now, when you say fight his economic fight, that is maybe an appropriate metaphor, because I have just turned to the chapter, "Be Prepared to Use Violence." And I wonder if I could get you to read the first paragraph of that chapter.

HAMID: Sure. (Reading) Distasteful though it may be, it was inevitable in a self-help book such as this that we would eventually find ourselves broaching the topic of violence. Becoming filthy rich requires a degree of un-squeamishness, whether in rising Asia or anywhere else, for wealth comes from capital, and capital comes from labor. And labor comes from equilibrium, from calories in chasing calories out, an inherent, inbuilt leanness, the leanness of biological machines that must be bent to your will with some force if you are to loosen your own financial belt and finally expand.

INSKEEP: That's a pretty brutal view of capitalism.

HAMID: Well, I think capitalism is brutal. It's not clear what the alternative to it is, but it is brutal.

INSKEEP: What are some of the ways that business feels different in a developing country like Pakistan, as opposed to business in the United States, since you have worked as a consultant in both places?

HAMID: The biggest difference, I think, is that in the U.S., there are more rules. And those rules generally work to people's mutual benefit. In a place like Pakistan, for example, or many other emerging economies, as they're called, there are fewer rules. So there is more corruption. There's more direct violence, intimidation, breaking of regulations. Now, as we know, these things happen in America, too. But the level of it is just more intense.

INSKEEP: So the rules are different, or less prevalent.

HAMID: Well, I would say, in a way, there's this whole debate in America. Like, what if the state got out of the way? What would happen? What would it be like? Living in Pakistan, I can tell you that in Pakistan, the state has gotten out of the way. There's rampant gun ownership. There's almost no taxes. There's a free-for-all, in a way, economically. And it is a very, very tough environment for human beings to succeed in.

INSKEEP: Do you feel, if you look at South Asia, if you look at India, if you look at Pakistan, the way that the economies are changing and some of the compromises that are involved there, is society getting better?

HAMID: There's two different sides to it. On the one hand, people are getting a little bit more to eat. They're living a little longer. Their kids are getting vaccinated. That's important. There's a material improvement that is going on, and I think it can't be denied. The problem, though, is something else. I think the problem is more psychological or almost spiritual, you could say.

There's a kind of spiritual and mental health crisis that's taking place. And you see that expressed in all kinds of strange phenomena, like terrorism and crime and depression. So there is a material improvement, but not yet a humane narrative to go alongside it.

INSKEEP: Mohsin Hamid is the author of "How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia," and also "The Reluctant Fundamentalist." Thanks very much.

HAMID: Thank you.

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INSKEEP: Mohsin Hamid's novels tend to be very short, though they take him six or seven years to write. He told us of an aesthetic of brevity. He says many young readers in his country are first-generation English speakers, and he wants novels short and bold enough that they can follow. You can find my essay on the novelist and how he writes at npr.org. You're listening to MORNING EDITION, from NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.