Dear Grandpa Yen, wherever you are ...

People everywhere love your life story. It inspired them, and now that you've passed away, it inspires them even more. Will it inspire them enough to do something about it? I guess a man with such long experience of this world knows the answer better than me.

Give it a week and we shall see. Your "simple" life isn't easy to duplicate, to begin with. Of course, with all the current emotions associated with your peaceful exit, your life under a bridge and in a little boat has become a great tale, romantic even. After a week, many of us who viewed you as our hero will hatch wicked plans on the stock market to take advantage of its slump, upgrade our home theatres and change our cars. After a week, we your grandkids and great-grandkids will start worrying again about what others have got, not what they don't have.

I have a decision to make today myself. I have to choose between a conventional investment of my provident fund and a riskier one. Simply put, it's like whether you should leave your life's savings with someone who would use your money to buy a farm and give you back the money plus some reasonable interest, or leave it with another who would go to the casino and either double your money or come back as pale as a corpse.

That's only the simplest level of how the world works today, Grandpa. And we got stuck in it. That's why we all love you - you could be what we can't. How could you have inspired us if we all managed to live simply on fish we caught? We admire you for the amazing ability to be independent from what happens to fishermen or computer software suppliers half a world away.

Your motto is, "Oysters have no legs, and put us to shame if we can't live by ourselves". Ours is, "Don't let anything happen to oyster exporters in France or our mutual fund is screwed and so are we."

We love to bite off more than we can chew. Funny, isn't it? The world's biggest economic crisis comes at a time when we are better equipped than at any point in history to put food in every mouth on the planet. It will wreck your brain, Grandpa, trying to figure out why we're in this mess.

The trouble in our world goes something like this: a lot of people in Village One put their bets on how many catfish Village Two will catch three years from now. In many cases, money was borrowed from Village Three to place the bets. Village Four insured the debts. Village Five bought some of the "bad" debts. When the "bad" debts got worse, they were sold to Village Six, which was somehow convinced it could turn them into profits. When an unexpected drought hit the second village, all hell broke loose.

There are more variations, but you get the idea. Don't ask me why we did all that. I suppose we simply are weak, insecure and easily tempted. You use prudence and self-reliance as your philosophy, but we resort to these only when our backs are against the wall and creditors knocking down our doors. You have the courage to put faith in your river and trust yourself in the event that it runs dry, but we so distrust our own ability that we are willing to gamble everything on how well others do.

Before I say goodbye, Grandpa, here is some good and bad news: your name has made more than 156,000 Google entries, hot on the heels of "Chearavanont" boasting 189,000 entries. Not bad for someone who would have to catch and sell 20 billion fish to match that family's wealth.

Bad news is, and I hate to say it, the statistics don't mean 45 per cent of the population will choose to live your life if given a choice between yours and the Chearavanonts. It's hero worshipping pure and simple. We are like kids who at night watch Spiderman saving lives from a burning house and in the morning play with matches ourselves.

So, after seeing you off at the cross-over, we will all timidly go back to the stock markets. It will be bargain-hunting time soon, after all the so-called rescue packages are in place. Wish us luck, Grandpa. And rest in peace.

One of your grandchildren.