If you can keep your riches when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can enrich your coffers when all opposition doubts you,
But make more riches from them too;
If you can lie and not be tired from lying,
Lying endlessly, blatantly, and don’t deal with the truth,
Or being loved, don’t give way to loving,
And yet always look good, never talk wisely;
If your friends can dream and make you the one to deliver;
If you never think, and never make sense your aim;
If you can meet with Hate and Bigotry
And treat those masters as your claim to fame;
If you can smear the truth that others have spoken
And twist it further for your group of fools,
Or watch things others have given up their life for, broken,
And stoop and stoop even further to break it in full;
If you can take the entire rich of the nation
And risk it on just two of your chums,
And lose every wealth of the great nation
And never breathe a word about the loss;
If you can force every established institution
To serve you long after their semblance is gone,
And still, hold on when there is nothing left
For the nation, except your greed that says “Hold on!”
If you can talk to crowds and make them lose their virtue,
And walk with oligarchs and stoop to their legs to touch,
If neither courts nor patriots can hurt you,
If all crooks count with you, but not one sane soul;
If you can fill the four long years
With every second’s loot in the urn,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Bhakt, my son!
