Times when every penny counted

Many people in my generation were raised in the late sixties by our parents with a relative sense of paucity and deprivation. I was able to go to a decent school with many amenities provided for, but lavishness or easy availability of money was never the case. ‘Single income family’ was the plausible explanation where my father was the sole earning member. He had the added responsibility to contribute to look after his extended family, which included brothers and sisters. The sum total was an acute awareness to live within our limited means.

The year was 1992; we had just passed out of a government medical college when one of the more affluent one among us found his matrimonial match in a charming damsel from the US. The marriage function was to be held in one of the finest luxury hotels of Delhi. All of us were excited at the pleasant turn of events for our dear friend. That for most of us it was going to be the first exposure to a five-star hotel was another attraction.

While at the hotel, I tried in vain to turn on the lights of the room. I was rudely ‘educated’ to put the card key in the socket at the entrance and everything turned into a dazzling array of exuberance. It was illuminating but embarrassing. My friend from the adjacent room came rushing to inform me that there was a fridge too in each room. As I was pleasantly overawed, he revealed that it was stocked with beer bottles and other goodies. He took out all the bottles from the fridge and fled as he did not want to waste such a ‘treasure’ in a teetotaler’s room. All in all, we were in a heaven afforded by our friend’s riches and enhanced by his prospective in-laws’ largesse.

In the evening was the sangeet where a celebrity woman singer was singing ghazals of Begum Akhtar and Farida Khanum. Currency notes were being showered on her; I too was nudged by a friend to join the frenzy. He whispered in my ears that as the groom’s friends we must not lag behind and should shed our middle-class reservations. Though I was sober, I carefully opened my wallet and took out a Rs 50 note. I whirled it over the head of my groom friend and off it went into the solicitous hands of the charming singer.

It took me a couple of months to come to terms with this financial loss as my monthly budget went haywire. I still remember that moment of awkward madness with an aching heart. It taught me a life lesson about the pitfalls of extravagance.