In defence of Bank Robberies

The other day I and my friends were discussing about the different career options we were left with. This post is an off-shoot of that discussion when we suddenly realised that we had been assuming a sense of superiority over a certain breed of human beings, till then. This is to atone for that sin of ours...

There is this charming aspect of bank robbers (or robbers in general) which is often ignored unless it is exhibited by someone of the order of Catherine Zeta-Jones, or suchlike, in a heist flick from the Hollywood. But, I realised their irresistible charm, as late as last week, though I have always had a vague idea about their existence since my childhood (mostly from those heist flicks in which the protagonists come with smart plans to loot huge sums of money from ultra-secure high-profile banks which have stuff like high-precision digital fart-detectors installed).
But this write-up is not about how smart their methods are. If you are interested in that, walk out to the nearest DVD store and pick up a dozen heist films and watch it over the next weekend. Not to forget that this might even ingerminate an idea for a new kind of heist in your mind. In which case, you can either choose to implement the idea and become a martyr. Or, you can write a film script out of it and sell it to the Lakshmi Movie Makers; or, even to Warner Bros., if you fancy.
But, I digress. This one is about the laudable attitudes that those noblemen exhibit; and so it'll be.
Robbers, especially bank robbers, are actually quintessential idol-materials for the bourgeois class, just as the stars of the filmdom are. Let's see why. The bourgeois junta wants money; which they are given when they work. So, they want work. They are given work when they are educated. So, they want to educate themselves. They are educated when they give money, which completes the circle. To cut off this recursion, they in turn expect (quite tragically) their parents (who just got themselves educated for the sake of money) to work and provide the necessary money. This chain of actions extends on and on endlessly, that ultimately the common man forgets why exactly he did whatever he did and ends up professing theories much worse than this write-up when asked about the origin of this vicious cycle.
But bank robbers act differently. They are daring, iconoclastic. They defy all the common norms of living, and how! They realise that all they need is money (like the rest of us) and take the shortest possible route. They drop in to a nearby bank, a place where what-they-want is available in plenty, just snatch considerable chunks, walk out and make a living out of it. Pretty straight, if you ask me.
Let me stop with this final note. It's high time we acknowledge all these qualities in them and have an annual event for bank robberies; Call it the Grand Robbery Mela (we can have a couple of wiki pages too). In which we will keep a bank dedicated for bank robberies and deem robbing that bank as legal. The bank may have all the state-of-art security set up, have people investing in it and can work like any other bank; except that anybody who is caught robbing this bank is not punishable by law. That will be fun and deserving folks will get what they want; rather than we losers having it.

{It might have been be easy to digest this piece if you had already read this. Hmmm.. these stuff might make for a terrible mini-series.}