Today's story is by one of my favorite writers, Salman Rushdie, one of his early stories, Good Advice is Rarer than Rubies, are about an old con artist and a woman seeking a visa to go to England. Anyone who's ever applied for a visa from this part of the world will empathize. There are few things as humiliating in our modern lives as applying for a visa, especially to the US, which I believe is probably the worse thing anyone can think of if they don't come from a privileged background like CG or political background. Ali the old man warns Miss Rehana to not enter the embassy and lose her dignity because that's exactly what they take from you. When we apply for a visa, we are supplicants, begging entry and the young bureaucrats who man those visa desks know that, which allows them to exercise a kind of power that is almost total in it's dehumanization. At the end, you come out feeling like a non-person. In this story, the holders of power are not present, represented only by the lala at the door, who acts on their behalf and feeds off some semblance of their power. Anyone who's dealt with the guards or Visa officer at the Us embassy in Kathmandu knows this lala very well. Miss Rehana doesn't get her visa and she seems happier about it. In a way, she's taken Ali's advice and made her peace with not going to England. She's salvaged some of her dignity and has not let the rejection destroy her. That advice was rarer than rubies. Ali is sad, she isn't. This is a simple story, short and poignant. It also has some of Rushdie's penchant for turns of phrase and brilliant prose: "The oldest fools are bewitched by the youngest girls." The story feels effortless, told swiftly and succinctly, with no unnecessary flourishes Found this on social media.