So
there was this village where one day a man appeared and said that he wanted to
buy monkeys. He said that he would pay a hundred rupees per monkey. The
villagers caught all the monkeys in the neighborhood and sold them to him for a
hundred rupees each. Soon another man appeared and said that he would pay two
hundred rupees for each monkey. But there weren't any more monkeys around. They
were all owned by the first man. So the villagers went to him and said that
they were willing to take the monkeys back and return his money. But the monkey
owner was unwilling to sell. The villagers raised the offer price to Rs 150 per
monkey, then Rs 175 and finally to Rs 199 but the man just didn't want to sell,
even though he clearly didn't have any use for the monkeys. Eventually, just to
see whether he would sell, they offered him Rs 200 but he still refused.
The
villagers were puzzled by this. Finally, one of them figured out that there
must be someone else who was going to come to the village and offer even more
money for the monkeys. Convinced that this was the real explanation, they went
and offered the man Rs 300 for each monkey and sure enough the man accepted.
Joyous at having landed such a good deal, they quickly paid him off before he
changed his mind and took possession of the monkeys. The man went away with his
money and presumably lived happily ever after. The villagers waited for the
next buyer. And waited. And waited. But no one ever appeared who wanted to buy
a monkey.
But
wait. If you think you've guessed the moral of the story, you are wrong because
the story isn't over yet. This story isn't quite the same as the monkey story
you may have got in one of those chain-forwarded emails. In my version, there
was another village nearby. In this village a man appeared one day and offered
a thousand rupees each for a goat. Now goats were valuable, but not as much as
a thousand rupees so the villagers sold the goats to this man. A similar thing
happened here too. A second man appeared, offered two thousand for each goat,
the first man refused and eventually the villagers ended up buying the goats
back for Rs 3,000 each. Here too, the two men disappeared and no one ever came
and offered so much money for a goat again. But there was a difference. Goats
aren't monkeys. They could be milked every day and the milk was good and
healthy. In fact I've heard that Gandhiji preferred goat milk. Even the goat
droppings could be used as fuel, though I'm not sure of that. When the goats
eventually grew too old to be milked, the villagers could kill them for mutton.
All in all, it wasn't a complete disaster.
But
the monkey-owners were not so lucky. They actually had to be kept in one's
house. The monkeys ate too much, shouted and shrieked all day and sometimes bit
people. Eventually, when it became clear that the monkeys were worthless, their
owners abandoned them and tried to forget about their losses. And that's the
moral of the story. In the stock markets today, there are good companies that
are overpriced and there are worthless companies that are overpriced. If you
are going to be a fool and pay absurd prices because you think that a greater
fool will appear in the future, make sure you buy a goat and not a monkey.
Source
of the story:
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