Pondering the catastrophic blunder that is After Earth, you feel somewhat sorry for Will Smith. The guy parses every beat of success, he has a system and it worked enormously well for over a decade, but now he has floundered into Godfather III territory and it is just as ugly now as it was when Coppola tried. It doesn’t work, never has worked, but parents are rendered stupid when they want their kids to begin at the peak. Sofia Coppola recovered from her inauspicious start but Jaden seems to have engendered too much ill will. When times are hard people applaud extra hard for the deserving, but they flatten the ones perceived to be entitled.
Rich people can teach their kids to manage wealth and how to choose managers if they don’t have a natural turn for it. That is maintenance, not creation, not originality. In fields where performance has to be validated by public and unforgiving parameters, inheritance cuts no ice. India is a kinship society and this particular fiasco is a familiar one. Cricketers and film stars get a disproportionate slice of the financial pie for they are perceived as genuine and authentic successes, not the consequence of lucky genetic combination. Strangely enough in the classical performing arts, where success and fame are not entirely at the mercy of public perception, the kinship and succession principles endure. {Visual arts, they try – and fail!} The perpetual embarrassment that was Anushka Shankar is the prime example, but too many dancers and singers and musicians are skating along on inheritance principles. This spills into spiritual circles too, but since most gurus were renunciate, it never got out of hand. But the tension between the gurus’ family and the disciples. who are almost inevitably more spiritually deserving. never really goes away.
Will Smith looked invulnerable, but in the end he too is victim to the forlorn stupidity that seems wired into human genetics – the pleasing delusion that we can spare our kids from effort and the authentic, independent discovery of their true selves.
Rohit Arya is a writer, a corporate trainer, a mythologist and a vibrant speaker. He has been an arts and cultural critic and social commentator for two decades. Rohit is the author of 4 books and been published in 5 European languages. He is an Author, Yogi, Polymath. Rohit is also a Lineage Master in the Eight Spiritual Breaths system of Yoga
zestandgrit 
Yes! This wanting something for nothing is pretty universal in our world at present, and the economic crisis purely illustrates it. The minority still work and cherish what they work at, and may the pendulum swing back towards this way, soon. Cycles – all cyclic patterns.