The Wall Street
Today I watched the 1987 movie Wall Street starring Michael Douglas, Charlie Sheen and Martin Sheen. I think this is a film every would be engineer in India should watch. The reason I say this is simple. Many of them are attracted to a glamourous career in finance industry – be in students from IITs, NITs or other institutions. In the process they hardly realize what they are heading for. The movie shows an unscrupulous Wall Street shark played by Michael Douglas who raids the companies uses them to meet his greed and a budding associate played by Charlie Sheen – whose father Matin Sheen is a union leader for an airline company. He is an honest man – but his son idolizes Michael Douglas. Finally they show how Charlie realizes the sins he is about to commit by falling for Michael’s traps and deception and goes out of the way to save his father’s airline company and jobs of workers. Finally – Matin Sheen tells his son that “Although you are going to jail – in a weird way this is best thing that could have happened to you. Rather than living off by selling and buying shares of someone else – finally you are thinking of creating things and not destroying someone”.
I feel sorry for the loss that India as a country makes by losing lot of such budding and creative minds to the lure of easy money offered by big finance and consulting companies of the world. By being engineers they may make much lesser money but enough to give them self respect and pride of having done something useful with the brainpower that they are gifted with.