The saving grace

Whenever people have asked me, or I’ve spoken of the “Indian culture”, I have always wondered to myself as to the single most important thing that defines my upbringing. I was looking too deep, trying to read too much into every part of my life, while it lay there all along – it was too simple to miss, and yet it was the quality that had the most profound impact on me. The differentiating attribute was the one I am grateful to my grandmother for ingraining in me.

While growing up in the Bangalore (Bengaluru just to the locals, then) of the 80’s, I had a penchant for fountain pens. There were various brands then – Chelpark, Bril, Luxor, etc at the lower end with Hero, Parker, etc making up the higher end price points. I had such a fetish that I was keeping track of every brand and model that came out – in hindsight, a very materialistic obsession with buying newer fountain pens. It was affordable enough for my parents and granny to buy me a few every year, but it wasn’t keeping up with the pace at which newer models were coming out! To inculcate a lesson that would hold me in good stead for life, my grandmother seemingly came up with a plan: if I came in within the top-3 ranks in my class (the much berated Indian schooling system then, of monthly evaluations followed by a top-to-bottom ranking within the student populace!!), she would give me 10 rupees every month, as a reward. I could use this to fund my hobby, but it came with a rider – I could only take up to 5 rupees every month from her, for she would deposit the rest into my bank account for future use. I was too naïve then to be made to understand the benefits of saving, so this was her way of helping me understand and inculcate the saving habit. Her reasoning for stashing away half of the money was to enable me to upgrade to the next level of fountain pen collections i.e. the more expensive ones, but fortunately or unfortunately, I outgrew the hobby before I got to that stage.
For what its worth, if I remember correctly, her educational qualifications till date remain as having completed 3rd grade of schooling. That had no bearing on her attitude in life, or what she has passed on to the next generations (that’s a new post altogether). She’s probably handed me by biggest lesson in life, and one that very likely defines a good part of the Indian / Asian cultures. People may argue that the Asian economies are no different today when compared to the Western ones; my counter to that would be that we live in too small a world economy today that its hard to be isolated from international influences. Dug deeper, the saving mechanisms would probably be the grace factor or the deterministic index of how wide the schisms are, or in simpler and more common terms: how big a bail out we need!