Okay finally I’m writing it! There has been a long internal struggle with my procrastination abilities and tendency to do other useless things and finally I’ve managed myself to write here again. Believe me it was hard, really hard to give up the comfort of just sleeping in my bed to write stuff I don’t even remember. Anyways I’m motivated and I’m going to finish it.
It has been a long time since my last post. Almost 3 years I think! Looking at my previous posts, I don’t even remember half the topics I was planning to write back then! If I try to write them now, it will be like an English assignment which we are forced to do and write to get marks. But I have been left with no choice and have to finish the things I started no matter what. So feel free to close the window if the content goes un-readable/uninteresting as I’m doing this only and only for me.
The easy way of doing things in life is a real bitch. It makes you addicted to it and you have go cold turkey to get out! The one obvious reason is the easy money. When you get tons of money from eating pie of a job, one tends not to look ahead. I will write more about money later, as this post is all about money money money. Another one of the main reasons is the lack of an appropriate environment. I started this blog when I was in college, with a lot of young minds and ideas flowing all around. But after getting bitten by the Physical endurance Bug, my mind has been on a standstill. Physical activities, in my opinion, is totally ineffective, for ideas to crop into the brain. Then there is Facebook/Gmail in the list. But the main reason for my absence from Writing, is my work. You would have read all about the IT industry, but no good happens of the brain when a human spends more time with a computer rather than with other humans beings. Of my three years in Cognizant, I haven’t talked as much as I have, during the first semester of college. Now all this is going to change. I am going to try and overcome this and force myself to get me out of the situation. So let’s start working these dead neurons in my head!
There are some inventions/discoveries by man which I regard as useless to credit to a single person. The things they invented/discovered are an integral part of mankind and all they did was, help in its realization. Fire, Gravity, Time, Wheel, Money - I put them all in this category. All of these were huge in terms of progress of mankind. If man were to be isolated and put in a different planet or something, I’m sure the generations will invent/discover these things not because of their intellect but the ATCG that is within them. Hence there is no surprise that humans are born as social animals as these are the things essential for building a society. Of all these things, I feel time and money are the ones which requires the management as both of them are quantitative to an individual. It’s the continuous quest for time and money that tags the humans as an animal in the society that we have today. I, like no different being, have absolutely no compromise in the Time or Money part.
As I believe in everyone’s lives, till about the age of 4, we do not have any regard for money. Though this varies to a great extent depending on the environment one grows up in. According to me, this is the only time when one can truly disregard money. After the realization of the barter, the child tends to act human. From here on, the value of money for every individual changes with age. At first I used to generalize the relativity with age, i.e. more the age, lesser the value for money. But these days I’ve come to think maybe it comes full circle at one’s end. I can only say what I’ve experienced and it has only been half way for me. I can truly say money value has taken low ride though the day I’ve realized it. I am going to site just that with the various examples below.
It was the day when I was watching Discovery channel when a Tigress adopted a Deer. It was the first time such a thing had happened and I was quite amazed to see that. Though I never really got the science behind it, but the chain of thoughts led me to think why the Tiger being a predator didn’t kill the deer even though it stayed hungry for weeks. It reminded me of my friend who donated money, my friend who deserved it more than the any person he was donating it to. Was he trying to imitate the Tigress? How? Well, its human nature to conserve money. Here in India, we have a whole god for money. The term family and living is built upon the concept of money. I feel money is the deer for humans. But the thing I fail to understand is why people have to act hypocritically to be the tigress that adopted the deer. Is being the noble and generous one, that much worth it? Everyone knows Darwins’ ‘Survival of the fittest’ rule and yet we try to fool ourselves telling stories about altruism.
Realization
Like most of the entities in life, you generally do not know how to measure the value of an entity unless we lose or gain it. It was my realization I think in my first grade or something. My family like most Indian families were conservative on money and the golden rule was to be self sufficient without any loans and save up as much as possible. STORY TIME - It was the time when I was being sent to the market by my neighbors to get something I don’t remember. They gave me Rs 5 to buy that and on the on the way the note fell out of pocket. This was the first time I had lost money and I swept the whole place almost 3 times to realize it was gone. I spent an extra hour in the bench thinking about what to say to the neighbors. Finally, I ended up crying in front of them, telling them that I lost the five rupee note. I punished myself so much that day for being careless and eventually hid this fact from parents on fear of a scolding. I experienced the opposite of this when I found a Rs 20 note on my terrace the other day. I still remember these two events till now and were one of the most important events in making me realize the value of money. Then there were other incidents like these when I used to walk kilometers just to save the Rs 2 bus ticket and proudly return it to my parents. The money I received from relatives as gifts had no value for me and everything went directly to my parents. Till this point in my life I believed money is better off with my parents rather than me buying useless things for myself. But everything seemed to change after the switch of school in 10th standard
Change in Value with experience
As I mentioned earlier, the value for money decreased from then on every step of the way. And this is due to the three big money blunders that I made. The first one was the Bansal IIT coaching. Rs 25000 down the gutters. Its human tenedency of relativity to forget the small things when you make the big mistakes. And hence I started taking 5/10/15 Rupees almost everyday for Chowmein, Cholle bhature, Gol Gappe, samosas after tuition. The second blunder was the Rs 200 that I spend on a discotheque which was a continued party from school farewell. From then on, Discotheques and dinners were a usual expenditure. And the final and most gruesome blunder was joining SASTRA college, Rs 50000 in garbage. From then on, lunch dinners in the hostel for 100/200/500 was a pretty common affair. I was in the impression that money spent on travels with the ‘gay 5’ was totally worth. Though I’m still not mature enough to make that call but still. All these attitudes toward money could’ve been inherited or is an integral part of me or could be due to a personal environment I was subjected to (which most of my friends assume). But I have seen these phases experienced by most of the normal people around me.
I think I reached the peak of me disregard for money just before I joined Cognizant. When a person starts earning money, he learns the true value behind it. The 11 hours of work per day in front of the computer can tire anyone even if they have a decent job. And this is the part when the money casts the spell on you. The bucks start accumulating in your bank and you like it. You go shopping every now and then because this is the time to fulfill those materialistic dreams. This is the part when even the most generous of people turn out to be penny pinchers. According to me this is the nadir of the money graph when the events occur again but just with one difference that you have more money with you that the previous cycle. Simply speaking, it’s the same thing all over again but in a greater magnitude.
But let me come back to the topic in hand, glad to the Gay 5, I retained some of the better perspectives about money. Some of these perspectives made me an avid trekker who doesn’t mind spending upto 6000 per month even if it is 30% of the salary. Glad to this vision, I have discovered my passion for trekking and traveling.
I know some of the things that I have said above makes me a total money minded person. And the worst part is I know whats becoming of me these days. But then I came across this quote from a wise man I tend to think otherwise–
“The only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it.”
P.S. - Three years after writing this post, I seethe incidents are factually correct. But the half MBA tells me this is a novice writing about time value of money. Anyways, its always good to read my own.
