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The Pony & The Rider

Choice

When a caravan moves, there are ponies in it that carry the weight and there are riders who set the direction and pace of the ponies. It is fair to say that both are essential components of a moving caravan. In other words, a caravan can move with just two of these and absence of either one will cause caravan to stop. In other words, pony and riders are necessary and sufficient for caravan to move.

There is no value judgement here, the idea is limited to exploring the diferences, understanding the world so we make the choices we want to make as opposed to letting the world make choice for us.

Does it make the two equal or is one more rewarding role than another. If you are the leader of the caravan, would you treat both the pony and the rider with equal support. Hypothetically speaking, if the two are not treated the same, what would you rather be, a pony or a rider.

Pony
  1. works for fixed hours of the day.
  2. He knows his job,
  3. he shows up,does his job, eats and goes back to his relaxation time.
  4. He socializes with no business objective, accepts life as it comes, believes in God and understand that God works in mysterious ways.
  5. The balance in life among food, work, pleasure, intellectual conversation is the foundation of his existence.

It is not unimaginable that ponies will occassionally organize themselves and demand a better treatment by riders, who can be merciless, if unchecked. Different ponies may jostle occassionally for relative positioning within the caravan.

Rider

A rider on the other hand does not carry any weight. The job of the rider is to

  1. set direction of the caravan and
  2. plan efficient utilization of resources to get there.
  3. The riders work when they need to work,
  4. eat when they can and
  5. do what they have to do to get caravan to the destination set by them.

There are forces that rider control and there are factors, e.g. sunrise and sunset, that riders work with. They socialize to reduce stress of the work and then use the time to energize themselves to plan the managemnet of ponies for the new challenges ahead.

The ponies are driven by their common desire to be good ponies for riders, that is how they are trained from birth and that separates civilized/trained ponies from the ponies of the wild.
Distinction

There are many similarites between the ponies and riders. Both are born out of their mothers, they eat, sleep and procreate and are destined to die some day. Both have emotions of love, loyality and socialization (to be among others who you perceive are similar to you).

  1. Similarity argument is more believable when one is going across the great african plains and there are no other caravans in view.
  2. The distinction becomes more visible if there are competing caravans or the terrain is not very friendly.
  3. At that time, the work of riders makes the difference even if the two caravans have same set of ponies.

A counter viewpoint to the thesis so far is that no two ponies are same and no two riders are same and the differnces mentioned above are part of the same continuum. In that sense, the distinction between the pony and the rider does not add any value to the conversation.

He can take his'n and beat your'n and take your'n and beat his'n
King
  1. If a king is riding on a horse, fully decorated, through town square, it is reasonable to visualize population bowing down to him.
  2. If you look from the horse's perspective, he only sees people bowing down to him.
  3. He can rightfully feel that people respect him.
  4. The argument that horse is worthless without the king on it does not work well either.
  5. Will the people bow down to man walking in the town square in the same way?

The more important distinction is who sets the direction of the king riding the horse.

  1. It is reasonable to think that the horse is not part of the decision making process.
  2. It is either the king or the kingmaker who controls the string and that is the person with the power to make changes and consequently deserves higher valuation.
Conclusion

  1. There is no claim here about binary world.
  2. The contrast is created to demonstrate the difference between two ends of a spectrum.
  3. Both the ponies and riders play important role and the success of the caravan is highly coorrelated to how well the two work together.
  4. The difference is in the thought process and to some people it is an important difference.
One has to figure out for oneself if one is made to be a pony or a rider. Whatever it is that you are meant to be, be a good one.