The power of keeping needs small

One of the things I have been blessed with is to be born into a middle class family in urban India. If there is one thing I have learned from my parents, it is to learn to take things as they come. My father has been a reasonably successful corporate executive, rising to VP of a large enterprise with a large company car and entitled to travel in the front of the aircraft. He has taken his family on holidays and treated me and my mother to experiences that living across the world can provide. But when he retired and we moved back to India in the late 80s, both my parents were equally happy with a Maruti 800 and traveling on Indian Railways. My parents do not smoke, do not drink and have never played golf at a country club. With no Havana cigars, no Dom Perignon and no club membership fees, their expenses for the month comprise largely of groceries, utilities, fuel, and taking the grandchildren out for a treat at a nice restaurant in Pune. During the times that I have lived outside India, add air-tickets for visiting us to the list, for they refused to let me pay for their air tickets. The secret to their happiness in the golden years of their lives, I have realized, is their ability to enjoy the good life when they had it and to welcome with equal happiness, the simpler life when they hung up their boots and moved back to Pune.

Those of us born into the Indian middle class with its sensibilities of frugality and abhorrence of flashy waste, perhaps do not realize the value of our simple lifestyles. Pu-La Deshpande, in his essay, Mumbaikar, Punekar and Nagpurkar poked fun at the limits of Puneri hedonism which culminates in no more than a good meal followed by a siesta. It is not very far off the mark. Our idea of a good time even today, with incomes far higher than our parents' generation, is an evening out with friends over a meal and perhaps a movie or a cricket match. Figure twenty dollars per person per event, or fifty dollars if you have bought tickets to watch the match live. It is this simplicity and frugality that the British failed to comprehend in Mahatma Gandhi and westerners yet fail to comprehend when playing hard-ball in negotiations.

I have a friend whose employer was trying to arm twist him into making concessions to standard operating procedure with a veiled threat of termination of employment. My friend, being the straight arrow that he is, did not catch the veiled threat until it was made more explicit, at which point, he said to his employer, "You have every right to tell me to leave, but I sense that you believe that I will not be able to survive without the salary you offer me. I don't think you understand how small my needs are."