When I was a little girl,
my parents never gave me an allowance, or ‘pocket-money’ as it is called here.
Instead, they asked me to lend a hand with household chores and gave me
‘payments’ for whatever work I did. Now I know a certain line of thinking about
parenting would condemn this as a bad idea since children should learn to do
household work as a matter of course and not as something for which they are
rewarded; I do not want to go into that debate here, because while an
interesting thought, it is a completely different issue from the one I now have
in mind. My parents’ method successfully taught me the joys and
responsibilities of owning money that is hard earned. In other ways too I was
exposed to the family finances from a young age, and as such came to handle
significant sums of money with confidence and care far earlier than most of my
contemporaries; indeed some still probably don’t, particularly among the girls,
and we are now in our twenties.
I never put a lot of
thought into my relationship with money, though. I come from a well-off
middle-class family, which puts me into the top 1% of India’s population. By
God’s grace and Baba’s hard work I have never had to know financial hardship,
and my only exposure to poverty has been through literature and cinema, and the
fact that I live in a country with an abysmal and ever-growing gap between the
haves and the have nots. In my family, the norm has always been to put money
firmly in the role of an instrument providing safety, comfort and convenience,
along with the ability to indulge in charity and the occasional luxury, the
former being viewed as an integral duty by virtue of being human, the latter
highlighting rare and special occasions such as vacations, the savouring of fine
liquor or festive shopping sprees. Our family has always believed strongly in
the value of living simply if not frugally with little attention to conspicuous
consumption. I spent the first sixteen years of my life in a small town without
ever using a ‘branded’ lifestyle product. Cell phones came late in our lives,
smartphones later still. Eating out was done maybe once in six months, maybe
less. The family car spent far more time in the garage than it did ferrying any
of us about. And our lives were none the worse for any of this. I never felt
any sense of loss or inadequacy from the absence of any material objects and
experiences that most families in our social class see as integral parts of
their lives, particularly in the big cities.
When I moved to Calcutta
for my higher secondary education, I joined a somewhat ‘elite’ institution
where a large number of the students belonged to one of the richest business
communities in India. Soon, I got used to seeing luxury cars outside the school
gate, and a certain snobbish stance in classrooms that translated into the
financial and psychological equivalent of ‘tu janta nehi mera baap kaun hai’
(don’t you know who my father is?!), though the latter was never directed
at me personally given that I was academically far ahead of most of them and
somewhat intimidating in my physical appearance and demeanour! This crowd was
conspicuously absent during my years at Jadavpur University, where the student
body’s so-called Marxist stance in life made way for the reverse snobbery of
turning up to class looking like homeless madmen who had just woken up from a
roadside ditch the done thing. Since I moved to Delhi though, the high school
variety of people have skyrocketed in my vicinity, particularly in my
university, which attracts that very crowd through its social as well as
financial model. I now reside and study in an atmosphere where branded
merchandise rule the day, as do parties and ‘fun’ that involve all sorts of
lavish lifestyle choices. And recently, from my time working at the India Art Fair
in Delhi, I have first-hand stories about the uber-rich who throw money at
artwork the way kids do in candy stores, and I am talking about seven-figure
sums here.
I have had the time to muse
long and hard about the issue of money and how it affects human lives. And at
this point, I feel sufficiently confident of having seen the entire spectrum of
financial capacities of people. And I must admit, I have come to despise money
and the moneyed more than ever before. I also pity them greatly, and I will presently
explain why.
My first and possibly
greatest grievance against the moneyed class is how money and civility seem to
be inversely proportional. This, I suspect, is particularly true about the rich
in India. We as a nation do not place much value on politeness and courtesy to
begin with, and the few of us who do practice these values to some extent often
do so more from the fear of being called out for misbehaviour than from an
innate sense of civility. As money brings a certain privilege and social protection
with it, that fear melts away, exposing the natural rudeness and uncouth
behaviour of the person. It is also a way for them to exercise their power over
the lowly plebeians; after all, how many will raise a voice of protestation
against someone who earns a hundred or even a thousand times as herself? This
brings me to the inflated sense of self-importance that these people have about
their lives and work. As part of my work for the Art Fair, my group had to
collaborate with some fashion designers, upcoming names in the Indian fashion
industry. One of them was an uncivilized lout who liked to strut about ordering
people with a sense of importance that was frankly ludicrous for someone who
is, in essence, a glorified master tailor. I am happy to say I had the chance
to take the individual down a peg or two and made good use of it. Afterwards,
as we trundled around the Art Fair thoroughly uncomfortable in the rather
mediocre looking but cut-throat priced designer-wear, we were congratulated by
several of the collectors (I have been using a rather less civilized term
invoking the canine family to refer to them in private conversations, as it
seemed to reflect their attitudes more aptly, but I will desist here for the
sake of propriety) for our ‘luck’ at getting to wear them, and advised us to
‘enjoy’ it while we could. I could not decide whether to be more astonished by
or full of pity at their idea of what brings joy in life.
That, I suppose, is my
second biggest complaint against money, as well as the source of my
contemptuous pity for those who have too much of it. The more one devotes
oneself to the pursuit of money as the sole aim of one’s life, the more
disconnected one seems to become from real love and joy and peace. Lives are
given meaning through the possessions one owns, and the prices one pays for it.
The art becomes insignificant unless the artist is expensive enough, the
vacation becomes pointless unless it is where all the other millionaires also
go and spend their money. The worst affected, of course, are not those who are
the real earners of the millions, but those who are his family – usually the
wife and children. The sense of entitlement they bring with them is
mind-boggling, as is the stupidity that is often an unfortunate additive. But I
suppose you do need the thick skin (and head) if you have to survive the
plastic lives they do, with their kitty parties and leather bags and gossips
about the latest ‘in’ things.
I feel saddest, though, for
the middle class, the class that aspires more than anything to be like their
uber-wealthy counterparts. And what they cannot emulate in earnings, they try
to make up for with the spendings. We have more and more families that are
aiming for designer trousseau and destination weddings but do not have adequate
medical insurance or retirement funds. And, perhaps worst still, far too many
people are giving into the lure of commodity fetishism and ‘living it up’ at
the price not only of their futures but of their present mental and emotional
growth.
Which brings me to the idea
of charity. Increasingly I am coming to the conclusion that human beings are
not inherently good and kind and keen to help others. They are often quite the
opposite, in fact, and have to be coerced by social institutions into putting
up a veneer of civility and self-restraint. Since no similar institutional
coercive measure exists in the case of charity, it is a small surprise that few
people, particularly among the rich, feel the need to do much about human
beings subjected to poverty. A former friend from Jadavpur who belonged to one
of the traditionally rich north Calcutta families and had no qualms while
talking about his collection of pens worth lakhs routinely fought with poor
rickshaw pullers over a few rupees and thought I was a gullible fool and a bit
of a squanderer for giving money to the various aid seekers, usually the old
and infirm, who regularly came to our campus for help. I am not denying that
there are many rich individuals who give away huge amounts of their money for
charity – I hear J. K. Rowling lost her billionaire status because she donated
so much of her wealth. In India, however, it is too little done by too few. In
my personal experience, it is often those who have to skip outings with friends
because they have to buy groceries that make charity a regular habit. One of my
history professors at Ashoka, while discussing communism in class, told us
about how he heard people at his gym defending the Ambanis spending obscenely
at the daughter’s wedding by arguing they had the right to do whatever they
wanted with their ‘hard-earned money’ while criticizing the idea of loan
waivers to farmers as it would make them lazy and encourage the bad habit of
not paying back on future loans. What does that say about the rich, and
about those who aspire to be so?
I know many will consider
this essay a classic piece of sour grapes, but I have myself considered this
possibility and rejected it with a laugh long ago. As I started out by saying,
I am acutely aware of my privilege of belonging to a comfortably-off family.
Having said that, I have not been able to decipher how several more zeroes to
the sum in the bank account would have made my life significantly more
fruitful. Greater scope for charity would have been one, and it would have been
nice, as Rowling had once said, never to have to worry about paying bills in
one’s life, but apart from that? What could I have been able to buy that would
give me greater long term life satisfaction? The consumer habits practised by
the moneyed, I have noticed, is based almost entirely on the question of
bragging rights. In my family though, the practice of discussing our incomes
with outsiders or asking after another’s has always been seen as a sign of
ultimate bad manners and unrefined culture, and the same goes for talking about
the prices of our possessions. Growing up with such cultural inclinations, how
on earth will buying a bag from Louis Vuitton or a watch from Gucci give me
greater joy than my present ones from Dressberry and Titan respectively?
I will close with a
reminder, to myself as much as to my readers, about what I said earlier about
making money a mere instrument and not the master of one’s life. It is
frighteningly easy to lose conviction if one is exposed to a frivolously wasteful
environment for too long. Far too many of my friends in Delhi have Apple phones
and laptops, and my open ridiculing of Apple users has, as a result, become
more guarded. It is only a matter of time, I’m afraid, before a sneaking desire
‘invest’ in a designer accessory may take root in my heart. I hope I will
remember to revisit my own writing then, to remind myself where that particular
path leads to.
