The Sweet-Bitter Solution

Dear President Clinton,

I understand that the CTBT’s something of a personal mission for you. That you’re genuinely concerned about minimising the nuclear risk and that you want to be remembered for this. As you work towards your goal, let me tell you a story.

Imagine, if you will, a room of 200 kids. Five rich and with bags full of candies. Another 10, rich too, hanging around with the candy kids but no candy of their own. And the rest, poor, resentful, bitter, determined to get their own candy.

The candy kids, true to the nature of kids, protect their turf fiercely. They dictate that the other kids can’t get sugar in their milk as sugar can be used to make candy.

The non-candy kids aspire to attain what’s denied them. Surely, Mr President, you don’t expect harmony and bonhomie in that room where a few flaunt and lick their candies while the rest salivate. What you do expect is that some of those candy have-nots will figure out a way to make their own candy. That some will sacrifice their food, their clothes, to raise enough money to buy a candy. And that some of them, surely, will plot to steal a candy.

If you’d tried telling them candies cause cavities, they’d point out that the kids with the candies didn’t seem to be any worse of. No, candies were a symbol; an aspiration. In that room, it didn’t matter if your shirt was torn as long as you had a candy; cavities be damned.

One day, it so happened that one of the rich candy boys felt that all this jockeying for candies was creating tension. He proposed that no one should try to make, buy or get by whatever means any more candy. The room would be a better room if everyone concentrated on improving their math scores and honing their athletic skills instead of getting obsessed about candies, which caused cavities anyway. The status was to remain absolutely and completely, let’s say, quo.

Now, Mr President, if you were one of the non-candy kids, I bet you’d have seen through this ploy immediately. Wouldn’t you have demanded that the candy kids gave up all their candies too? That the room should be declared a candy-free room and then, yes, everyone would go about improving their math scores? That’s exactly what happened. Demands for a total non-candification of the room started finding voices.

Were they fools or simply innocent kids? How did they ever think that the candy kids would agree to actually throw away their candies? Or were they smarter than one would think? Or was it simply the morality of the deprived?

How does the story end? Should I tell you that a fierce candy war erupted, destroying all? Or should I tell you that a candy accident happened? No, I’ll tell you about one rich candy kid who displayed an understanding belying his age. One who realised that once kids know about candy, banning it would not help. Because someone, sometime, will get one candy, somehow. And the game would start all over again. He reasoned that while kids don’t throw away candy, kids do share.

From today, he said, my candy is ours.

Mr President, if you want to shape history, be ready to share your candy. It’s the only alternative. Let them stop being American, Russian, Indian candies; let them be world candies. Let them all be in one place. This way, it’ll be possible to drastically reduce their numbers. Let there be a global command and control. No one will have them and yet, everyone will have them. A rogue kid will have to face the combined might of the whole room.

The difficult thing isn’t to sort out the processes and modalities. The real difficult thing, and any kid will vouch for this, is to have the wisdom and the courage to share without fear.

In my story, the kids sorted it out. And then they went back to improving their math scores and to playing and laughing. And what fine men and women they turned out to be!

Thanks

Aditya

(Aditya Jha is the director of strategic marketing at Aditi Corp, a world leader in Net-based customer service solutions)