How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

Mahrah Al Qasimi

Professor Derlugyan

Social Analysis Of Global News

Book review

September 16, 2015

How to Get Filthy Rich In Rising Asia

How do you get filthy rich in rising Asia? According to Mohsin Hamid who sets the book in an in a nameless country in South Asia that closely resembles Pakistan, that exudes liveliness, opportunity and inequality, there are steps. He outlines these steps in what he labels as a self-help book.

The first step is to move out to a city. The story follows the third son of a cook’s 70-year life and uses the second person that speaks directly to the reader. When “you” move to a big city “you” simultaneously gets himself a job as a DVD rental delivery boy and an education. “You” goes from delivery boy to young entrepreneur with a bottled water business that thrives.

The second step is to fall in love with a pretty girl. He falls in love with “the pretty girl” who seems more freethinking than him. He says he recognizes “her potential to be a model” and she runs away with him. The hero places her in his heart as the ultimate woman and remains there forever.

“You” then, attend university and join a political organization that offers him “a monthly cash stipend, food and clothing, and a bed” in exchange for membership. “You” notice that the affluent students and corrupt administrators now look at “you” with a sort of nervousness. “You” walk out on the organization after his mother dies an unbearably agonizing death due to cancer.

“You” sets up an industry in the bottled hydration business, become an entrepreneur, and finally become what Mohsin dubs as "filthy rich". “You” become as successful as the pretty girl who has become a well known model and “earns as much as a retail banker her age”. From a job as “a non-expired-labeled expired-goods salesman” he sets himself up as a bottled-water tycoon. “You” emulate a rag to riches story. He started pouring boiled tap water in water bottles from restaurants and turned it into a prosperous major league business. This then allowed  “you” to live in a gigantic house, with a driver and a security detail to protect “you” from the jealous masses.

The final chapter is emaculates why you should read this book, you shows us how to “have an exit strategy”. In the end “you” loses. He is an eighty-year-old man in a hotel room trying to remember to take his medicines regularly. The lesson is how to relinquish health and hope; how surrender assets to thieving relatives and one’s children to America. Hamid writes. “Slough off your wealth, like an animal molting in the autumn,”

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Conclusion-why you should read the book