Greed Has Many Faces. The Human Wears It Best.

Survival is a basic instinct. And when that is at risk, raw emotion like fear or courage is displayed. In the wild, the play of these emotions is a sight to watch! Humans are animals too—perhaps the animal with the lowest emotional quotient in the kingdom.

Emotions that animals perceive and experience are generally common, except one: Greed. Humans seem unique in their ability to accumulate far beyond necessity—not merely for survival, but for status, power or desire.

Greed is a state of mind—or perhaps an emotion—defined by the dictionary as: “Wanting more money, power, food, etc. than you really need.” Have you ever seen an antelope gather grass for another day, a tiger hunt a month’s ration, a wolf pack keep two dens, or a hyena steal from a lion only to save the meal for later? NO. But you have certainly come across people stocking food for a month, owning multiple houses, or stealing what is not theirs—not out of need, but out of want.

At Ayodhya, people entrusted with the affairs of the Ram Temple demonstrated that greed can be more powerful than even fear.

Ayodhya, the birthplace of Lord Ram, is home to the Ram Temple. People working for the temple found a way to siphon off donations, worth crores of rupees, that devotees in good faith had donated to the temple. To me, and maybe to a large section of people, God is a symbol of hope—a hope for a bountiful harvest, a job to feed the family, good health, and for every need and want. And where there is hope, there is faith.

That is the reason, why faithful followers are never in short supply across the globe. Faith can take extreme forms; a war in the name of faith or an act of terror in the name of faith. While the actions of humans in the name of faith can vary, the underlying reason does not change: Faith moves people to act in the belief that it will lead to something greater; that greater thing is hope.

A donation at a temple is an act of faith: whether it is a thank you or an atonement, nonetheless it is built on a hope that God will act. And because of this, there is rarely a shortage of donation to religious places, especially if they are associated to the religion’s core characters and stories.

Ram temple at Ayodhya is no exception. Lord Ram is worshiped as epitome of a perfect human, and Ayodhya is where he was born and ruled from. A temple at such a place carries a significance and emotion that only a follower can relate to. The temple in its present form is just over two years–hardly an age of significance in a country whose temples often date back a thousand years or more.

Offerings, in the form of donation, have poured in from people within India and the Indian diaspora that is spread across the globe. Given the scale of it, managing those offerings in good faith is the trust’s foremost responsibility. Individuals working for the trust allegedly embezzled donations that the faithful had offered to the Lord in good faith. Is this a one off case or restricted to one geography or religion? Absolutely NO.

Look around, and examples are not hard to find; there are multiple cases of people who are meant to act as keepers of trust and faith break it for their own wants: The adulterated ghee case in Tirupati prasada, the corruption case in the Vatican (London real estate trial), the Hajj permit corruption cases, and so on.

Greed is not confined. It is all-pervading.

Greed may stem from fear of the future, aspiration, or the desire to experience luxuries that would otherwise remain out of reach. Whatever the reason, human greed is an insatiable desire for excess–wealth, status, power. History and the present are replete with examples of greed both at an individual level and at a collective level. Humans have a special talent to be the only animal to display greed in its most vulgar form. And yet, greed is nurtured, knowingly or unknowingly, in every facet of human existence.

Greed is rarely born in spectacular moments. It begins quietly—in convincing ourselves that one more shortcut is acceptable, one more lie harmless, one more possession necessary. The theft at Ayodhya merely made visible what often remains hidden in everyday life. Perhaps that is why greed survives. It never announces itself as greed. It arrives disguised as entitlement.

Aragorn, in The Lord of the Rings, said, “They were once men; great kings of men. Then Sauron, the Deceiver, gave to them nine Rings of Power. Blinded by their greed, they took them without question, one by one falling into darkness. Now they are slaves to his will.”

That is what greed does–it takes over an individual’s reason for existence. And when that happens, a human is ready to commit almost any act without a second thought. Greed ensures that even the most primordial emotion—fear—is overcome: the fear of moral failure, legal consequence, or even divine judgment.