Five Star Billionaire

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Some time ago — I forget exactly when — I decided that I would one day be very rich. By this I mean not just comfortably well off but superabundantly, incalculably wealthy, the way only children imagine wealth to be. Indeed, nowadays, whenever I am pressed to pinpoint the time in my life when these notions of great fortune formed in my head, I always answer that it must have been sometime in my adolescence, when I was conscious of the price of life’s treasures but not yet fully aware of their many limitations, for there has always been something inherently childlike in my pursuit of money — that much I admit.

When I was growing up in rural Malaysia, one of my favorite TV programs was a drama series set in a legal practice somewhere in America. All the details — the actors, the plot, even the setting — are lost to me now, blurred not just by the passage of time but by a haze of bad subtitles and interrupted transmissions (the power generator and the aerial took it in turns to malfunction with crushing predictability, though in those days it seemed perfectly normal). I am not certain I could tell you what happened in a single episode of that soap opera, and, besides, I did not care for the artificial little conflicts that took place all the time, the emotional ups and downs, men and women crying because they were falling in love or out of love; the arguing, making up, making love, et cetera. I had a sensation that they were wasting time, that their days and nights could have been spent more profitably; I think I probably felt some degree of frustration at this.

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