Life is tough. You now need qualifications to be a beggar in Asia. Only professional panhandlers will be able hang out in rags and plead for money on the streets of Thailand after new laws come into effect, I heard from reader Dan Kubiske. After all, you can’t have any old riff-raff muscling their way into the profession.

Other Asian nations are watching to see if they should adopt the system.

Fancy moving to Thailand to pick up one of the coveted posts of "Vice President, Begging"? Don’t even think about it. "This will be a reserved occupation exclusively for Thais," said reporter Anucha Charoenpo in a press article on the legislation.

This is a result of globalization, of course. The government is protecting its home-grown begging industry from the threat of competition by imported beggars, or multi-national chain beggars.

I know this all seems unbelievable, but it’s true, and actually makes a lot of sense. I’ve got to know several Asian beggars over the years and they are proud and professional people. Yes, so they say crazy things and go to the toilet in their clothes, but don’t we all do that from time to time? Let’s not be elitist.

The next logical step is for beggars to start their own professional body, and do all the stuff that other professionals proudly do – you know, develop a charter, hold international conferences, and get arrested for molesting hotel chambermaids.

The most impressive beggar I ever met was a guy in Vietnam called Min. When I didn’t respond to his English-language plea for cash, he switched to French, then German, then Japanese. He was an intelligent man who spoke every language. Think of the Pope living on a pavement in Hanoi (but minus the white night-dress and Nazi allegations).

I didn’t want to corrupt Min with cash, so I bought him a bar of chocolate. He refused to eat it, complaining that milk chocolate had high levels of sugar and fat, and besides, he preferred dark chocolate, preferably organic.

"You’re smarter than I am," I said to him. "So why are you a beggar?"

"Because I’m smarter than you are," he said, strolling away.

I thought about this. I’m not one of these people who romanticize the lives of the poor. But the fact is, one often sees people in poor parts of Asia who are intelligent, healthy and have abdominal six-packs—unlike sallow, brain-dead, floppy-bodied tourists whose six-packs come from Wal-Mart.

Last week I met a filmmaker who had been trying to make a movie about the tragic life of peasants in rural Asia. But the countryside looked so idyllic that the movie delivered the opposite message. I spent last weekend talking to filmmakers, writers, poets and dancers—who speculated endlessly about the best ways of applying for arts council grants.

Yes, everyone’s a beggar. It’s a matter of scale.

I once met a Hong Kong guy who wrote to a philanthropic foundation asking for US$150 million. He was a good letter-writer. They wrote back saying that they were interested and wanted to meet him.

Hopefully my kids will grow up to be as smart as that. Of course, knowing my luck, they will probably go completely off the rails and end up scraping out a subsistence living in some lowly profession: as doctors or lawyers, maybe.