Hustle

Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits.
- Thomas Edison

Recently, I've been following the brit tv series, Hustle. It is basically about the adventures of a group of con artists in a modern London setting. As TV dot com puts it, it is the story of group of specialists in the way of the grifter and all are keen to liberate cash from the amoral and undeserving. It is like the modern robinhood epic and the only difference is that while Robin does his thing for charity work most of the time, the brit cons do their thing, well sometimes for charity work for friends and sometimes not. As always emphasized throughout the series, they con greedy people not for money (although in reality, part of it yes) but in some particular way, to give lessons for them, the greedy people and for the sake of challenging themselves (con artists).

I guess two things have to be noticed here - giving lessons and challenging the self. For the first one, the question would be that who are they (the con artists) to give lessons to the greedy people. Who are they to regard themselves as karma agents to those who deserve to get karmas? Are they in any way appointed by the people to act as such? Or are even legally assigned to act as such? This leads me to the next question which is, if it would not be them, who else would it be? I leave the pondering to another time so that I could proceed to the second one which is about challenging the self. This I think is the most interesting part about the series. You see, I like the series not because of the techniques I can learn about conning other people but because it is all about constantly challenging the self.