I want to talk about money. Not simply because I’ve spent all week calculating short-term capital gains and filing my taxes, although that is part of my angst. While, like most people, a significant part of my adult life has been spent carrying a niggling anxiety about money — can I afford this, do I have enough, when are school fees due, will the rent go up again this year — in the last few years it has transformed into a more insistent, more pervasive anxiety. Despite the fact that I like to work and that I am one of those rare people who actually likes the hustle and bustle of a city life and have no desire to escape to the mountains or a beach to spend the rest of my life in relative solitude, I have begun to see the need to make money as something that needs some kind of an end point. A hard-stop, as corporate jargon would describe it. How much money would be “enough”, I find myself asking people — friends over drinks, strangers on Twitter. No one knows.
Some pretend they do. Only when the returns from your portfolio can completely replace the loss of income, one told me. While it sounds intelligent, it seems to me like an endless run on the treadmill. The more salary you earn, the bigger your portfolio should be in order to replace it entirely. Sure, some people may be running on fancier treadmills, wearing the best gear and hydrating themselves with mineral-enriched water, but they are running nevertheless. I think, for a large majority, it would be fairly impossible to say, “well, I have — I don’t know — ₹50 crore in my portfolio and therefore I am not going to miss the ₹1 crore salary I earn”.
Now, throw children in the mix and watch this get even more interesting. We have reached a point where parenting is, at its core, a competitive sport in unabashed consumption. People say “I want nothing but the best for my child” without a trace of irony. And what is “best for my child” is often determined simply by “more expensive than what you bought your child”. Yet, ruing the fact that procreation continues to be an unlicensed privilege afforded to the unqualified does not take away from the reality that providing some kind of a ‘secure’ future for the kids is every parent’s goal. But where does one draw the line? It used to be that parents tried their best to ensure a good education and then set their children upon the world and asked them to go fend for themselves.
Well, that’s not enough now. The world is a more treacherous place and it is necessary that children, even when they are grown-ups, be provided a safety net. What exactly constitutes a safety net? A trust fund of sorts. Certainly some real estate. A very “sorted” mother sat me down and explained, “Imagine if you didn’t have to pay rent. Or mortgage on your house? You’d save at least 40 per cent of your expenses. Can you believe the kind of freedom that’ll offer your child? She could think of being an artist, even.” I wasn’t sure if that was the best time to point out that my child would need some kind of artistic talent first to become an artist, that free housing alone did not create Monet or Picasso.
Yet, no matter how much you try to tell yourself that you don’t want to play that game, it is hard to ignore how much you are failing at it anyway. As speculations about other people’s salary figures — the number of crores in it — and photos of uber-luxury holidays paid partly from the bonus this year, and the valuations in multiples of hundreds of crores that someone’s start-up commands floats through our WhatsApp groups and Facebook walls, the anxiety that you aren’t living enough, saving enough, parenting enough becomes a physical force that is hard to ignore. In talking about this with a friend, another single mother, who vigorously nodded her head in agreement and went on to describe that she finds herself unable to breathe through the weight in her chest on the first day of school after vacations when the children swap stories about “where they went abroad”. For how long can you tell them these things aren’t important, she asks.
There are people around us, ordinary-looking, normal people, sitting on hundreds of crores. There are people around us who are willing to kill a sibling for ₹2 crore. In this incessant wave of stories about people who would do anything for it, it is hard to tell yourself that money isn’t important. It is even harder to tell your child that. Just for once, it would be useful to have an expert of some sort write a number and make it the law.
Before you write to me in a reprimanding tone to say that money doesn’t bring happiness, let me tell you that I am not suggesting it does. All I am saying is that today, when most of us have much more than we ever had, an unduly large part of our lives is consumed by worrying about how little we have. It feels like an endless ride. And it feels impossible to get out of.
Veena Venugopal is editor BLink and author of The Mother-in-Law
Follow Veena on Twitter @veenavenugopal