14 - Responding to cultural diversity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 January 2022
Summary
Ram Gidoomal is an author, entrepreneur and former UK group chief executive of the Inlaks Group, a multinational business with 7,000 employees. He and his family were forced to leave wealth and prosperous business interests behind them when they came to Britain from East Africa as refugees. He began his business career in the family corner shop in Shepherds Bush and followed this by spending a short time as an analyst with Lloyds Bank International in the City of London. He was Founder Trustee and Chairman of the Christmas Cracker Charity which has given thousands of young people direct entrepreneurial experience and which has raised over £5 million for projects in developing countries. He serves on several boards in the private, public and voluntary sectors.
[Earth's problem was]: most of the people living [there] were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper which were unhappy…. (Douglas Adams, So long, and thanks for all the fish, 1984, p 7)
This essay will make special reference to my own South Asian background in the context of Britain's minority ethnic communities, which include the African, Caribbean and other communities.
Although there are many definitions of ‘money’, they are essentially different aspects of the same thing. For the economist, money is an economic foundation. For the sociologist, it is a social good; lack of it is a social disadvantage. For the activist, it is a means of empowerment. For the social demographer, it is a medium of social mobility: inner-city gentrification is ‘money moving in’.
The question of the right use of money, however, has many different answers. I came late to Western capitalism: born a Hindu, brought up a Sikh and educated in a Muslim school, I arrived in Britain as a refugee in the 1960s and encountered (and later adopted) the Christian religion. From a very early age, I realised that attitudes to money tend to be driven by cultural, religious and philosophical views.
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- Information
- The Right Use of Money , pp. 103 - 112Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2004