Barriers to Style

March 15, 2011

A few months ago, I vaguely resolved to become a well-dressed person. The chain of thought leading up to this momentous decision was something like this:

  • I ought to have  really stylish visiting cards
  • Hmm, but if I have really stylish visiting cards I ought to have really stylish card cases too instead of yanking them out of my wallet
  • And if I’m going to have four different sets of cards for four different social contexts, I’ll need lots of pocket space
  • So I really ought to get a summer blazer to carry my card cases in style
  • If I’m going to wear a summer blazer, I might as well make sure all my clothes are that good
  • So I ought to be well dressed

Neo-Edwardianism is mighty! For twenty-eight years my mother has tried to convince me to dress well, and I could not see what the point was. And yet, the humble calling card led to a chain of thought that made me revise my entire outlook on being well dressed. Unfortunately, while my intention has changed at last, the outcomes have not. I remain slobby. There are three major hurdles on the path from wanting to be a natty dresser to actually being one. These are:

  1. I don’t know how
  2. My waistline
  3. My budget

I shall now elaborate on these three hurdles.

I Don’t Know How

A quote from Cryptonomicon is apposite here:

It is trite to observe that hackers don’t like fancy clothes. Avi has learned that good clothes can actually be comfortable–the slacks that go with a business suit, for example, are really much more comfortable than blue jeans. And he has spent enough time with hackers to obtain the insight that is it not wearing suits that they object to, so much as getting them on. Which includes not only the donning process per se but also picking them out, maintaining them, and worrying whether they are still in style–this last being especially difficult for men who wear suits once every five years.

So it’s like this: Avi has a spreadsheet on one of his computers, listing the necks, inseams, and other vital measurements of every man in his employ. A couple of weeks before an important meeting, he will simply fax it to his tailor in Shanghai. Then, in a classic demonstration of the Asian just-in-time delivery system as pioneered by Toyota, the suits will arrive via Federal Express, twenty-four hours ahead of time so that they can be automatically piped to the hotel’s laundry room. This morning, just as Randy emerged from the shower, he heard a knock at his door, and swung it open to reveal a valet carrying a freshly cleaned and pressed business suit, complete with shirt and tie. He put it all on (a tenth-generation photocopy of a bad diagram of the half-Windsor knot was thoughtfully provided). It fit perfectly. Now he stands in a lobby of the Foote Mansion, watching electric numbers above an elevator count down, occasionally sneaking a glance at himself in a big mirror. Randy’s head protruding from a suit is a sight gag that will be good for grins at least through lunchtime.

The scenario outlined in the second paragraph quoted above – good clothes, made by an expert, and delivered to you without you having to actually worry about how they appear is so aspirational it’s practically the stuff of high speculation (but then Neal Stephenson is a science fiction writer). Alas, in the real world, I have to figure out whether something looks good along with being comfortable or not.

This is tremendously hard. Being colour co-ordinated is just one problem, and even that can be solved with a brute force method – restrict all colours to white, blue, grey and black. But then there is the whole issue of fit. My mother hates a pair of my jeans on the grounds that they make me look weird. I can’t even conceive of jeans changing the way I look. These are matters beyond my understanding, like Things not from this world, but between.

Ahem. The point is, I don’t get which colours go with which other colours, and what cuts and fits are right for me. In fact, I don’t even get whether cuts and fits are the correct concepts that apply here. I suppose this may be learnable, and fear that it isn’t.

My Waistline

For the past five years, my waistline has been oscillating between a size 32 and a size 34. It keep buying size 32 trousers in the hope that I will get back down to size 32 some day, but this has never happened.

Never happened yet. For the incredible dreariness of the food at the Kanchipuram guesthouse ensures that I eat only what is necessary to keep myself going. A year and a half ago, size 32 trousers started fitting. This year, the waist itself fits comfortably and the problem is more with the slight roll of flesh that is squeezed up and out over the trouserline. That too shall pass. I have an exercycle and I’m not afraid to use it. Except when I’m really sleepy. Or I’d rather eat. Or write. Never mind.

My Budget

At an abstract level, being well dressed is an attractive idea. But when it comes to taking action, I find that all things being equal, I’d rather be rich than well dressed. This creates problems. When I have to buy clothes, I pick the cheapest possible option, even if a more expensive option will actually be more durable and thus more value for money. (On the note, see the Vimes Theory of Economic Injustice.) I make up for the lack of durability by stretching the item in question beyond its usable life. This isn’t always a conscious decision – as a corollary to point one about not knowing how, I may not even know that something is actually beyond its life – this is usually pointed out to me by my mother. With great exasperation and vehemence. Sigh.

There are sales, of course, but they come only twice a year, which means I have to buy a year’s worth of clothes with two months discretionary expenditure budget. And since they usually come in the months when I’ve already spent the budget on air tickets or some similar big-ticket item, I end up not making use of the sales at all.

The solution to this would be to set aside money every month, hold it in reserve until a sale happened, and then take advantage of it. And thirty kilorupees a year would probably comfortably cover my wardrobe requirements. Even if I decided to go all out – suits, summer blazers, dress shirts, multiple pairs of formal shoes, and so on – setting aside five kilorupees a month would probably cover everything.

Unfortunately, for two years now my monthly budget has been designed so that I don’t actually have five kilorupees to set aside. If my income rises to a point where I do, my first instinct will be to start a new mutual fund SIP. There are only two ways out: iron will power to keep the money aside for clothes and not savings, or to become so rich that I start making my investments in multiples of ten kilorupees and five kilorupees don’t register mentally.

I see a long, hard road ahead.

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Posted by Aadisht

On Chequebooks

February 19, 2011

I used to work for Standard Chartered Bank, and so my salary bank account was with them. Even after I left, this continues to be my main account. This was partly because I already had mutual fund installments set up to be debited from it, and I was too lazy to go through the rigmarole of shutting them down, and starting fresh ones from a new bank. There is a moral here in how excessive paperwork prevents customer churn.

Anyhow. Right from the time I got the StanChart account, I faced a fair bit of mockery from people like Skimpy and Swami about how difficult it was for me to find ATMs, how I would never be able to pass a cheque in a small town, and so on and so forth. These days, the situation has flipped. My StanChart account is actually more convenient than an HDFC or ICICI account (perhaps not SBI).

This is because of three reasons:

  1. Debit cards and credit cards are accepted everywhere regardless of issuing bank, so the gap between an HDFC and a StanChart is closed.
  2. My balance and assets under management with StanChart have built up to a level where they give me unlimited free cash withdrawals at any bank’s ATM in India. So the ATM gap is closed.
  3. The major problem with StanChart is that cheques are only payable in forty cities in India (and that counts Gurgaon, Panchkula, Secunderabad and so on as separate cities). But now that electronic funds transfer is widespread, that doesn’t make much difference. You can just take someone’s account details and wire money to them instead of going through the nonsense of sending a cheque, having the recipient carry it to the branch, deposit it, and then wait three days for clearing. And – this is the best part – StanChart gives free EFT. HDFC and ICICI charge 5 rupees for every transfer.

(On the other hand, I have to pay Rs 250 to receive a foreign currency remittance. This will continue until I reach the truly rarefied echelons of private banking. Oh sigh. Then again, I don’t know if ICICI and HDFC manage to sting you for this too.)

Now as several people on my twitter timeline have pointed out, this is remarkable lunacy. Charging for electronic transfers and keeping cheques free encourages people to use cheques instead of EFT. This wastes:

  1. Paper
  2. The time of the guy receiving the cheque
  3. The time of the people working at the branch and operations back offices, who’re now processing cheque clearing when they could be doing something better with their time

This may be because ICICI and HDFC think that the convenience is worth 5 rupees per transaction. Moreover, there are so many old people who’re forcing them to maintain branches anyway, they might as well fleece internet users until the older generation dies off. The five rupee EFT charge is just the latest in the list of ways in which the older generation is screwing over the younger generation (other, more severe examples include fiscal deficits, ecological pollution, and tiger momhood). Or it could just be because they treat internet banking as a profit centre, their product managers are determined to show revenues somehow, and nobody on top has made the connection between EFT charges, people shifting to cheques, and higher operations costs. Which it is, only someone from the banks can tell us.

Assuming we lived in a sane world, everyone used internet banking, and actual cheque operations could be brought down to a minimum, the fees would actually reverse. You would have to pay to use chequebooks (oh, and I think ICICI and HDFC also charge for additional chequebooks in a year or something, while StanChart doesn’t. Snort.) while EFT would be free.

In such a world, cheques wouldn’t serve a functional purpose as much as an aesthetic one. You would give someone a cheque if you wanted to make a ceremony out of handing them over (white) money. Actually, this is already done with the giant cardboard cheques at cricket matches and quizzes, but I was thinking of something more understated and classy.

Because of the huge back office costs a bank would incur in maintaining cheque clearing operations, cheques would become ridiculously expensive, like annual fees on a top-of-the-line invitation-only credit card. Probably more expensive, honestly. They’d be offered only to really rich private or premium banking customers, and as such would be really good-looking cheques. They wouldn’t be the ostentatious prize ceremony cheques, but regular sized cheques on really nice paper – thick and creamy, with lots of embossing.

They would be to electronic funds transfer what a Vacheron Constantin mechanical movement timepiece is to a quartz digital watch: very good-looking and made just as functional at ridiculous expense. You could draw them out of a coat inner pocket and sign them with a fountain pen, and the aura wouldn’t be ruined by low-gsm paper. Or, for that matter, say “I say, Ram Avtar, be a good chap and fetch me my chequebook, would you?” They would be neo-Edwardian cheques.

Of course, none of this will be possible until electronic funds transfer becomes ubiquitous. But then it is only good and proper that modern technology brings about neo-Edwardianism.

5 Comments | Arbit Fundaes, Business, Consumerism | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Aadisht

Notes From a Delhi Weekend

October 11, 2010

Or, too long for tweets, too short for individual posts. This is an Amul Chocolate blogpost. Or perhaps Goldilocks. Whatever.

  • To my great sadness, I fell sick on Saturday, and though my family had tickets to the athletics events at the Commonwealth Games, I wasn’t able to attend. I’m not sure when India’s hockey semifinal is, but between leaving tomorrow afternoon, and the immense difficulty in getting tickets, I think I won’t be able to attend that either. Such is life.
  • The innermost lane on all roads to Games venues have been reserved for vehicles with Commonwealth Games stickers. I am astonished for two reasons – first, that Delhi’s drivers are actually obeying this rule for the most part; and second, that there are so few vehicles with stickers. Since this is Delhi, I would have expected anybody with even a tenuous connection to anybody in government to have stickers. This is not the case. Astounding.
  • My home is near the tennis stadium, and thus my neighbourhood has born the brunt of Commonwealth Games ‘beautification’. In the past year, our sidewalks have been ripped up and relaid thrice. The last time (in the beginning of August), this involved raising the sidewalk to a height of six inches above road level. All well and good, except this was also done across everyone’s gates, making it impossible for cars to move from the roads to the driveway. The next morning, the MCD Senior Engineer accepted bribes from everyone to build small ramps to facilitate entry and exit. Well played, I say.
  • That said, the new sidewalks and road berms are very nice indeed. They are lowered to road level at zebra crossings, the berms too are interrupted to make an island at said zebra crossings. And when I walked from Safdarjung Enclave to Green Park, the new sidewalks made the walk much better than it used to be. However, it is still not perfect, because six things keep fucking up what is otherwise an excellent sidewalk:
    • power transformers
    • garbage dumps
    • cars parked on the sidewalk
    • street vendors
    • security guard boxes
    • shops enroaching on the sidewalk
  • The last two categories – shops pushing their displays or stairs onto the sidewalk and security guards’ kiosks being placed on the sidewalk instead of inside the house are sheer bad civic sense on the part of private parties. The street vendors and cars parked on sidewalk are bad luck or incompetent planning – Safdarjung Enclave and Green Park were developed in the 1960s when few households had even a scooter, and nobody could have anticipated that every house would have two cars at least. The transformers and garbage dumps on the sidewalk, though, are inexcusable enroachments by the government itself on public property.
  • There is now a FabIndia outlet in Green Park. Delhi visits have therefore become even more expensive.
  • Green Park Market is becoming positively Chennaiesque in the density of pharmacists. It has at least five, in what can’t be more than a three kilometre stretch. I suspect this may be a result of the Adyar Ananda Bhavan triggering a slow metamorphasis. If it continues, than in twenty years Green Park will no longer have Punjabis but elderly TamBrahm thathas taking morning walks in GAP shorts and white Converse sneakers. Whatay.
  • I also finally got to travel on one of the new low floor buses with the bright green paint jobs. If you can get a seat, they’re definitely more comfortable than the old rattletraps. If you can’t, there’s not much difference. The getting on and off on the low floor is a small delight though.
  • I have more to say on the subject of buses, but that is a blogpost (or possibly an oped) in itself.
  • The Hindi signage for the Green Park metro station reads ग्रीन पॉर्क and not ग्रीन पार्क. That is, Green Paurk. The signs inside the coaches are fine though. I am mystified.
  • The Airport Express Metro Line is not ready yet. Oh sigh. But more on that in a separate post.
  • The Metro coaches themselves are very nice, and the way they use LEDs in the route strip above the coach doors to show which station is coming next is very clever. They also have power points for laptop and mobile charging; though the coaches seem far too packed for anybody to use these properly.
  • Yes, the coaches are jampacked, even on the South Delhi stretch of the Yellow Line that people were afraid would be underutilised, because, hey, South Delhi snobs always take their cars. The Violet line was only jampacked upto JLN Stadium though – and that was presumably because people were going to watch the Games. But then again this was on a Sunday night – a weekday maybe more crowded.
  • There was a Wired article which said that the major attraction of public transport over driving yourself was that instead of focusing on the road, you could read, or play games on your smartphone, or tweet, or suchlike. This is true in general, but the Metro is so crowded that reading will require immense concentration and Zenergy. And the network in the underground parts of the Metro is good, but not good enough.
  • In fact, the Metro is so crowded that it leads to practically Bombayesque levels of overhearing other people. On the violet line, I ended up overhearing a girl who was terribly unclear on the concept of interchanges. This was in addition to the person who asked me at Central Secretariat station if the train we were getting into was going to… Central Secretariat. He believed that the sign saying Central Secretariat was actually denoting the train’s destination.
  • I was tempted to be snarky about people who cannot understand how the Metro works, but after reading this Slate article on signage, I am more sympathetic. It is actually an important question – how do you explain the concept of an interchange to somebody whose learning style does not mesh well with maps?
  • Also on the violet line was a small child who was surprised that the train suddenly emerged from the underground tunnel and went on to a bridge. His mother explained to him that the Metro runs both under and above ground. He pondered this, and then nodded gravely.
  • The story of 4000 condoms being distributed at the Commonwealth Games Athletes Village and then the drains getting clogged with the condoms (insert cleaning your pipes joke here) is by now known to everyone. But all these foreigners keep having sex anyway. What I am more concerned about is – are the games also helping the local teenage volunteers get any action? They seem suspiciously cheerful. And if they are, how much does the bright red and white volunteer tracksuit contribute to this happy state of affairs? It is true that bright plumage helps birds attract mates, but in that case only the male is brightly coloured while the female is dowdy. But here, the male and female volunteers both have the same shiny tracksuit. This must be investigated.

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Posted by Aadisht

Quarter life crisis?

June 22, 2010

When I was a student, carefree and cheerful, I wanted nothing more than to grow up quickly to earn money and do things that adults could do… Now that I am an adult, I realize how naive I was to think so – as those were the best years of my life.

As I talk to my friends, colleagues, batch mates, acquaintances, most of whom are a products of India’s finest educational institutions, including the top business schools; I realize that no matter how well they are all doing – almost everyone seems to confess not feeling “content”. One would think that a degree from India’s top management institute, a job with a fortune 500 company, marriage to your college sweetheart and plans to start a family would lead to happiness or contentment – but it doesn’t seem so, unfortunately! On 2 different chat windows, I have one friend who seems to have a great job and all of the above but is complaining as his job profile doesn’t have any travel while on the other window my other friend who heads the international business division of his company is complaining how he hates waking up in a new hotel room every second day, being away from home 20 days a month and not to mention the toll time zone differences take on health! So, you see one has what the other wants but there is no guarantee that the first guy will be very happy if he gets the second guy’s job and vice versa. So it is with being single and being married – my married friends think I am very lucky to be single and my single friends (very few left anyway) and I feel that suddenly our friends are disappearing as they are getting married and starting families!

So what is it that we need to do to feel happy, content, satisfied? First we need to start with getting our priorities right. Unfortunately nowadays, people don’t spend time introspecting and thinking what they want and let peer pressure decide what will their priorities be. So if everyone in my group/ network/ circle has a big car, suddenly my much loved small car may seem to make me feel out of place. Or if everyone is talking about their holiday abroad, I may feel compelled to do the same, even if it puts a strain on my finances. The pressure to be accepted seems to be really getting to us – everything we do, it’s to get a nod of approval from our so-called “friends”. In the process, we change as people – becoming materialistic and forgetting to enjoy the “simple” things in life. To give you an example, if your office is at Nariman Point, when was the last time you enjoyed the sunset at Marine Drive – chances are quite high you may remember your nights getting drunk or eating food at the most expensive restaurants with peers in the same area but don’t remember when you did something simple as viewing the sunset. The pressure to be seen as a high performer in companies is tremendous – as managers we are only concerned about the numbers – revenue, target, budget; so much so that we have forgotten something basic which is to be “nice”; we have started measuring people in terms of the money he/ she makes – nothing could be more shallow than this. This is also taking a toll on our lifestyles – we are increasingly becoming home to highest number of heart patients and obesity is becoming a national problem. I met a few of my friends recently and could barely recognize them – the kilos they have piled on due to working late hours, no exercise, junk food is not funny. So while I may get that coveted promotion which helps me buy the big car and even that dream house; it’s actually coming at the cost of extra flab on my waistline, no time to enjoy the simple things in life and no time to be nice or even smile at people. And then one day, one would look at oneself in the mirror and think – what the hell am I doing with my life; I have the salary, nice house, chauffeur driven car, holidays abroad – but is that what I wanted out of life – is this the purpose of life and that’s when the crisis hits you.

Some of my Shanghainese friends who were visiting India recently asked me for help and I thought they would be interested in exploring all the history, culture of Delhi/ Agra and planned for them to visit all places of historic importance – turns out they cancelled this plan and instead all they wanted is to shop till they drop dead as they wanted to come back and flaunt what they bought! We are becoming so materialistic that we no longer want to spend money on experiences, but only on things we can wear/ decorate our homes with/ show off to others. In China, its very easy to tell a Shanghainese woman from those from others parts of the country – the Shanghainese woman is very hung up on appearances; to her the most important thing in life seems to have a Louis Vuitton handbag in one hand and a starbucks coffee in the other – even if its means not having money for other basic or more important things in life like higher education, saving for retirement, etc. In fact there is even a term for these women who spend their money on all these things important for their social status and then run out of money last few days of the month – Yue guang zu (月光族) – meaning “spend all your salary” – these women play a big hand in China’s domestic consumption. Madonna’s song “And I am a material girl and you know we are living in a material world” truly sums up their life! Apparently these women think that they will get noticed with the right stuff and right image by a foreigner (no matter how much older he may be to her) and then they wont have to work for rest of their lives (wishful thinking in some cases!). (My next post is on the Chinese women’s craze for white skin). Even in India, for people in their 20s, idea of a well spent weekend is to visit shopping malls, and get drunk.

Both in India and China, the biggest craze seems to be around owning a house – at least that’s an investment unlike a LV bag – but the length to which it drives people crazy is not funny. I know a guy who when sent abroad on assignment skipped dinner every day to save money to go back and make the downpayment for a house. In our parent’s generation, a house was something one bought close to retirement. Today if you are twenty-something and don’t own a house or are not planning to buy one immediately, you are almost a social pariah. I was having lunch with my Chinese friend the other day, who mentioned he is very ambitious and would like to reach senior management level – I suggested that he should look at an MBA from an Ivy League b-school – to which he said that he can’t do so as all almost all his salary goes into EMI for his house. In China and probably more so in cities in India, women refuse to marry a guy who doesn’t own a house!

Given all this its not surprising that people feel lack of contentment – working at jobs trying to outshine the others; a long stressful commute to work; paying home loans, car loans, personal loans, education loans – you name it, they have it; not getting time for themselves or with family; holidays becoming more of a ticking-number-of-places-visited event rather than unwinding. So when the next time you find yourself fuming over that non-deserving-colleague who got promoted instead of you – take a deep breath, relax; go for a jog/ swim; spend time with your loved ones, specially with very young or very old people; learn a new language; read that book you always wanted to; learn how to cook some new dishes; go on a backpacking tour and when you come back you will actually pity the colleague who probably doesn’t even get to see sunshine for most of his/ her day!

And not to forget; even if you win the rat race, you still remain a rat!

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Posted by Aadisht

Notes From My Bombay Trip

June 21, 2010
  • My Jet Airways Citbank Card finally came of some use and I used miles accumulated since 2007 to get myself a return ticket to Bombay where I attended the NiTyaGu wedding. Regrettably, Airport Development Fees and Congestion Charges cannot be paid for by miles.
  • When introducting Konnect, Jet Airways seems to have forgotten to make provision for it in the frequent flier program. It takes as many miles to redeem a full-service ticket as a Konnect ticket. Naturally I booked full-service tickets.
  • Having a full fare ticket allowed me to finally enter the Jet Airways lounge at Chennai. Alas, the lounge has no wifi, is slightly dirty, and while I was there had not only hyperactive kids but a Malaysian couple who fought over the guy tying his shoe instead of listening to the girl. The guy then made the girl cry. Am I the only person who notices these bizarre domestic disputes?
  • Having a full-fare ticket also meant I got to watch 30 Rock on the inflight entertainment system (Nishit D and PGK, please note). Also, two episodes of Sarabhai v/s Sarabhai.
  • Apropos of inflight entertainment systems, now that K Maran has taken over Spice Jet and is going to rename it Sun Airways, will it start offering Sun TV as inflight entertainment? If this is too expensive for a low cost carrier, will it just play Kalaignar’s poetry on the PA system? Will Azhagiri now buy Go Air in retaliation? These are burning questions.
  • Bloomberg UTV has hoardings up all over Mumbai claiming to be blunt, and sharp. It is clearly the Schroedinger’s cat of Indian broadcasting. That means that if anybody actually watches it, it will collapse.
  • Speaking of hoardings, I did not see a single hoarding or OOH banner that referred to the football world cup while in Bombay. I fear its obsession with Indian celebrities is now crowding out everything else.
  • The banana lassi at Theobroma is awesome.
  • Theobroma is now offering to courier its brownies anywhere in India. Unfortunately payment can be made only at Mumbai. This makes it useful as a gifting option where the gifter is in Mumbai, but is pretty useless if you’re in Kanchipuram and want to order. This week I shall call the Colaba outlet and ask if they’ll take payment by EFT.
  • Kodhi made me (and others) watch the 90210 season two finale. This led to consequences that are too scandalous to discuss outside a W-File. Unfortunately, I am not going to start writing the next W-File until at least July.
  • The grub at the Rajdhani in Oberoi Mall was seriously good. In fact, the khichdi, kadi, and jalebis were themselves worth the price of the whole thali.
  • I met PGK at the reception. Like Sreesanth, he is a personable young man. Unlike Sreesanth, he is not Mallu.
  • TamBrahm weddings are like ERP implementations.
  • Sambhar in Chembur continues to rock.
  • My Jet Airways Citibank Card also came in useful at Mumbai airport, where I got complimentary access to the lounge, which didn’t even care what my ticket was. Unfortunately, the lounge is only marginally less noisy than the public seating area, so I shifted there. Oh sigh.
  • A lounge that banned children would be quite excellent. To fend of accusations of elitism and child-hatred from mommybloggers, it could accomplish this by serving alcohol and barring entry to anybody less than 18 years old. I am still not sure how it could get rid of other annoying guests, like the ones who loudlly discuss compensation schemes on their blackberries. Tchah.
  • The wifi in Mumbai airport was down and didn’t start working until it was almost boarding time. I will have to add the appropriate tags to this post later, when I get home. Also, the wifi is only free for ten minutes. Oh sigh.

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Victorian Ladies and Financial Ninjitsu

May 30, 2010

Samtaben’s post has led to a massive comment discssion about financial independence for women. Oddly enough, I had recently been reflecting on financial independence and financial awareness among the women characters of late 1700s to early 1900s literature (English, that is). They are personal finance ninjas!

These women couldn’t inherit much property, and they couldn’t work either. This lack of financial independence led to acute financial awareness. They know how much their net worth is (and also how much the net worth of an eligible bachelor is). In Pride and Prejudice, we’re told Bingley’s annual income a mere fourteen paragraphs into the book. By contrast, The Diary of Bridget Jones doesn’t mention income or net worth at all in hard figures – it’s only alluded to in descriptions of where Bridget’s parents live, Mark Darcy’s job, and so forth. And then the rest of Pride and Prejudice goes on to talk about various quirks of inheritance, the income of various men, and so on and so forth. (And yes, there will be a blogpost or column at some point about how the book is about Goldman Sachs). In Vanity Fair, Becky Sharp knows exactly how indebted she is and how long she can keep her creditors at bay.And so on up to Saki in the early twentieth century, where there are so many female characters who talk about the interest rates on various bonds.

Then the Edwardian era starts, and we get PG Wodehouse and people start marrying for love instead of money. Money problems are now resolved by unleashing entrepreneurship – health farms, onion soup bars, buying rubber estates in Malaya – with the seed capital arranged through stealing diamond necklaces, holding pigs to ransom or simple blackmail. But there’s a sudden crashing of financial awareness – none of the characters is bothered about how much something yields. There’s a blissful unconcern for the mechanics of finance. Then again, there’s blissful unconcern for pretty much everything in Wodehouse, so perhaps I should go and reread Somerset Maugham and make sure this is the case throughout the era.

The Gift of the Magi (to be fair, it’s American) is written in 1906 and is a sort of turning point of financial awareness. Della knows that she’s broke, but has no idea of how much her hair is worth until she goes to get it appraised. On the other hand, she’s sort of financially independent – she doesn’t work, but she does run the household accounts herself. (Incidentally, I can’t read that story without rolling my eyes at that couple and the poor communication in their relationship. Here is xkcd’s much funnier take on the story.)

The odd thing is that while the women in Victorian literature is hyper-aware of what investments yield, my own relatives are not quite as keyed in. My (alive) grandma is paranoid about her cashflow and how she handles her accounts, but is clueless about investments. My aunts are better off in that they know about investments, but stick to fixed deposits and (sigh!) property. Actually, I now recall that this is not strictly true. In my childhood, my bua would not give me presents for my birthday as she didn’t know what I wanted, and she didn’t give me cash as she was afraid I would blow it all on riotous living. So she gave me US-64 units, and the Unit Trust of India blew it all on riotous living. But that is a separate matter. She was aware of mutual funds, is the point. However, she was the exception – my mum and other aunts usually stay away from financial securities, and park their money in the nearest available fixed deposit. Any shares were bought by the menfolk on behalf of the ladies, with the ladies usually not even aware of what they owned or what they were getting.

I was discussing this with Nilanjana Roy back when I was in Delhi last month, and she said that the financial ninjitsu was pretty common in Real Life India as well, because women would come into a marriage with nothing but their dowry. (I was a couple of beers down at this point, and they were the first beers of 2010, so I may not be repeating her words with great accuracy.) So this is weird. Is my family atypical in not having women who monitor their net worth madly, or is this an artifact of being Arya Samajis and so not putting dowry?

Beloved readers, put fundaes in the comments! What is your experience of financial awareness, and that of the women around you? Does it match Samtaben’s worries that women without financial independence have no financial awareness either? Does it match the Bronte sister’s characterisation of financially dependent women being acutely financially aware? Or are you in the happy position of being a financially aware and independent lady?

1 Comment | Books Movies and Music, Finance, Personal | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Aadisht

Neo-Edwardian Calling Cards

May 27, 2010

The Art of Manliness blog recently (well, actually, a couple of years ago) had a post on how the Victorian custom of calling cards had died out, and lamented the fact:

During the heyday of calling cards, using a business card for a social purpose was considered bad manners. Today, while business cards are great for making business contacts, they still aren’t really suited for social situations. They probably have your work number and work email, and not much else on them. Think of all the times you meet someone you’d like to see again. Handing them a business card is too stiff and formal.

While this is true, a Victorian-style calling card will not fit all the situations we are confronted with in our modern world. This is a common failing of the Victorian aesthetic, which emphasised form over functionality. To achieve form and functionality, we must turn to Edwardianism. And since this is the twenty-first century – Saivite neo-Edwardianism.

What does this involve? Among other things – taking advantage of technology. To abandon Victorian straight-lacedness and adopt the more genial and creative values of the Edwardian era. To respond to problems with appropriate solutions and not with an arbitrary code of etiquette. Just as King Edward himself changed fashions to suit his waistline rather than change his waistline to suit his fashions, so too we must change calling cards to reflect the situations in which we will use them. And in this era of desktop publishing and printing on demand, that means a visiting card or calling card for every situation.

I can think of cards for at least six different situations. These are:

  1. The visiting card your employer gives you, if you are working as a salaried professional (or even a professional working on commission, come to that). You have no control over this. The email on it is your work email. The phone number on it is your company phone. And unless it’s your own company and you decide the logo and card design and suchlike, there is not much you can do to customise this. All one can do with this sort of card is to accept it and move along. Back when I was a salaried yuppie, I tried for three months to get cards printed in which my designation was ‘Corporate Ho’ but my boss refused to approve anything except ‘Associate Purchase Manager’. Then I moved to Bombay, where I was in the Corporate Head Office on a project. It finally looked like I could get away with a business card that said ‘Corporate H.O. – Special Projects’. Alas, because it was a special project I was working on secondment in a business unit that was not actually my cost centre, and nobody could decide who would pay for my new business cards. Before things could be sorted out I had quit. Such is life.
  2. The visiting card you make for yourself if you do freelance work and meet people to pitch to them. So if you’re a consultant or writer or photographer looking for clients, you have a website that shows your portfolio or lists your past work and satisfied clients, and your visiting card includes that, your dedicated email for freelance work, your LinkedIn profile, and a dedicated mobile number for this. A dedicated mobile number may seem a little extreme, but it’s three thousand rupees extra at most. Or you could put a dual SIM phone. What is there?
    The card then reads:

    Aadisht Khanna
    Quizmaster
    www.aadisht.net/quizzes

    or

    Aadisht Khanna
    Writer at Large
    www.aadisht.net/portfolio
    99808 26537

    I met Shefaly last year. She’s a freelance consultant, and she got her business cards printed by Moo. They were plain back with only her website address in white text. Very cool.

  3. A visiting card to give to shops and restaurants and sales agents and suchlike. It’s useful to get marketing offers and freebies, but not at the risk of subjecting yourself to spam. The solution is simple – create a dedicated email address for all your consumer transactions, and use that whenever you have to fill in a feedback form or purchase order form. If you want to be really ninja about this, you could get a dedicated mobile number for this as well, and use a cheap-ass Maxx Mobile that you’d switch off when you didn’t want to be disturbed with assorted personal loan offers. And then you can put the dedicated shopping email and mobile number on a visiting card, and drop it in the bowl whenever a shop or restaurant invited you to do so to get special offers. If you wanted to kick it up a notch, the card could include your monthly free cash flow, so the shop would know when not to bother sending you offers on things you couldn’t possibly afford.
  4. If you’re single, a visiting card to give to interesting members of the suitable sex. This card would have your name, personal phone number and email, and perhaps a link to your facebook page. To make it more effective, it could include a short testimonial from your best friend, or a description of your attractive qualities. Like “Consumer Banker of Repute”. Or “I drive a VW Polo”. Or “Skilled kisser. References available.” You get the idea.
  5. A card which you attach to presents or cash envelopes. This sort of card is actually wildly popular in Delhi. Actually, we take it for granted so much that I was astonished when Namy Roy and Muggesh asked if it was a Dalhi thing. This is a Dalhi innovation that works, and which the rest of the country should adopt. This card usually contains your family name (or the names of everyone in the family), the house address, and nothing else.
  6. And of course, a personal visiting card; with your personal phone number, personal email id, links to your blog or twitter id or facebook page, and so on. Your address, if you’re comfortable giving that away. If not, you could leave enough white space to write it down for the people you did want to give it to.

Visiting cards are only the beginning. To really unleash the neo-Edwardian aesthetic, we would abandon Facebook walls for personal email and even handwritten notes when possible. Handwritten notes in turn would call for personalised stationery, which too should be customised to purpose as much as the visiting cards described above. A world in which we send letters on high-GSM cream-coloured paper, with custom embossing depending on who you were writing to and why, is a much better world than the one we have today. We should do our utmost to create this world.

5 Comments | Arbit Fundaes, Domesticity | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Aadisht

A Much Delayed Important Announcement

May 14, 2010

I am now a columnist for Yahoo! India. My brief is to be a humour columnist, so I will try hard to be funny. The column will appear on alternate Saturdays. The first column is here, and the next one will be out tomorrow morning.

Points to note:

  • So far, I am a failure as a columnist. Almost all the other columnists in the spectacular lineup have been getting hate mail/ hate comments. I have got nothing despite being a humour columnist. I must be doing something wrong.
  • I am not going to link every column from the blog. The columns have their own RSS feed. Also, Yahoo! apparently is also working on a spiffier website with an easy to remember address for the India columnists.
  • You can’t comment on the column page itself, but there’s a link between the headline and the main text to the Yahoo Buzz discussion, where you can leave comments. I may respond to comments over there – my Yahoo! display id is double a.
  • You can send me email about the column to the stereotypist@wokay.in id mentioned in my bioline.
  • The first few columns will probably be very different stylistically, until I figure out what works best. But I’m hoping to bring back a character I created when I first started writing on the internet.
  • The Year in Preview posts will stay on this blog. Yahoo doesn’t get those.
  • I get paid for doing this! I am now officially a little bit hippie.

5 Comments | Personal, Plugging | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by Aadisht

More Than Angstploitation

September 15, 2009

Something which has worried me since 2004 is Euphoria’s Maaeri. Is it actually an all-time great song, or do I just think so because it was lucky with its timing and came out just when me (and my batch) were in the grip of teenage angst and susceptible to any decent song about pain, lost love, and fickle/ missing/ unattainable women. When you’re in an engineering college where the education sucks, the extra-curricular scene is a wasteland, and there isn’t a single woman worth talking to (and not that many men either); hearing other people sing about being crushingly alone or having lost the love of their life provides the schadenfreude necessary to keep you going through those four years. And after four years of exploiting your angst, the song sticks with you and gives ou goosebumps even when you’re in a college full of strong junta, or have a job you enjoy, or have a darling girlfriend.

So as I was saying the question of whether Maaeri was actually a great song or just a lucky song that exploited our generation’s collective teenage angst when we actually had teenage angst plagued me. Finding an objective answer to this question was of vital importance, otherwise any Best Songs of All Times list we prepared could never be accurate. At one time, I seriously considered having a son just so I could shield him from Maaeri through his formative years and make him listen to it only once he had gotten over his teenage angst. In this way I would have a controlled environment in which to test the emotional appeal of the song. Eventually I realised that this would be child abuse, and besides, I could do it to anybody else’s son instead. If he too would respond to it by becoming senti, getting down on his knees and singing along loudly, we would have proof that Maaeri was actually a great song for all times and not just for our generation.

But this week, over a long conversation with my parents, aunt and cousin-in-law (the one who my cousin eloped with, thus bringing honour to the family), I think I’ve settled the question once and for all and so raising my own children or kidnapping other peoples’ won’t be necessary. Maaeri is in fact an all-time great song.

I realised this when I compared Maaeri to another song from the same time that also played heavily on teenage angst – Chaandni Raatein (youtube link, embedding is disabled). That had angstmax lines like दुखिया आँखें ढूँढ रही हैं कहीं प्यार की बातें (these miserable eyes are trying to find something about love anywhere). But the song didn’t even need that – the chorus was enough.

चांदनी रातें, चांदनी रातें / सब जग सोये हम जागें / तारों से करें बातें

(On moonlit nights, while the whole world sleeps, I stay awake and talk to the stars).

It just lays on the angst and pathos. It’s the senti engineer’s kryptonite. And if said senti engineers weren’t cynical enough to lay on the booze and weed, but not despo enough to pile on to women from Bhatinda (pronounced Bathinda), they pretty much had to spend their nights sitting around in the lawns loudly and tunelessly yowling Chaandni Raatein.

So back in the innocent days of the early 2000s – before global financial crises, before extraordinary rendition, before DJ Aqeel even – Chaandni Raatein had teenage angst well in its grip and was applying the olive press treatement too. But where is it today? Nobody remembers it. When I did remember it, I realised that it no longer affected me the way it used to.

But Maaeri is still going strong. The song (with or without the video) still gives me goosebumps. If only the fresh batch at IIMB weren’t such maggus who never came to L-Squares, we could do further tests and see if they dropped to their knees and started singing whenever it was played. I bet they would, despite all the magguness.

And now, the video:

You know, the video leads to another insight. It is very cliched, but the genius of Pradeep Sarkar is that he deploys familar tropes so effectively that an entire story can be told in a six minute video. You can see that in the Piya Basanti video too, and the Aana Meri Gully video (which even without the storytelling is awesome just by virtue of having young cute Sandhya Mridul in it):

Also, a couple of related links: Deepak Shenoy’s comment on my old Maaeri post, and the NITK Numbskulls on the all time best Indipop.

9 Comments | Books Movies and Music, Personal | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Aadisht

Drivers I Despise

September 2, 2009

Because the whole point of the Internet is to complain loudly and gracelessly about everything that is wrong with the world, I shall now complain about the most exasperating drivers in India. They are the drivers who have greyed my hair. They are the drivers who add twenty minutes to my commute every day. They are the drivers who… fuck it, let’s just get on with the list. The five worst sorts of drivers in India, in ascending order of how much I hate them, are:

  • Truck drivers on the Chennai-Bangalore expressway, who drive only in the fast lane between 40 and 50 Kmph. In contrast, Jat and Serd truckers on the Delhi-Amritsar highway are angels of driving ettiquette who stick to the middle lane and don’t swerve or zigzag. On the other hand, because the Chennai-Bangalore truckers are consistent about sticking to the fast lane, you can always overtake from the slow lane without any fear. So they stay at #5.
  • Armed Forces Wives in the Willingdon Camp area, who go around an empty roundabout at 10 Kmph. Invariably they drive a white Maruti 800 with a regiment or squadron sticker on the rear windshield, where it probably blocks the rear view mirror’s field of view.
  • All Forms of Traffic in Calcutta. Calcutta is a nightmare maelstrom of twenty five year old Ambassadors that smell fifty years old, kerosene powered autos, and pedestrians putting dharna or hartal. Fixing it is best accomplished by taking off and nuking it from orbit. It’s the only way.
  • Indicabs in Bangalore: you know how I mentioned that the saving grace of the trucks on the Bangalore highway was that they were consistently in the fast lane and you could overtake from the left? Well, when it comes to cabs in Bangalore even that luxury isn’t there. The odds are good that the cab will be an underpowered dinky little Indicab going at 30 Kmph. The odds are also good that there won’t be just the single Indicab in the fast lane, but a phalanx of them forming a diagonal across all the lanes, so that even overtaking from the slow lane isn’t possible.

That brings us to the single most loathsome form of traffic, which is:

  • Cargo Three Wheelers between ITO and the Haryana border.
    Where do I begin to describe the awfulness of a cargo autorickshaw?
    With the combination of the centred driver cab and the ginormous cargo space preventing the driver from seeing anything behind him?
    With the engine creating so much noise that the driver can’t even hear you honking?
    With the fact that the bloody things pick up where the Indicabs left of when it comes to driving in all lanes?
    Or that they’re unreliable pieces of junk which break down in the middle of the road, forcing traffic to flow around them?
    Whatever. I hate them. Hate them hate them hate them.

I await the day my commute drops from 80 Kilometres to 20 with breathless anticipation.

4 Comments | Personal, Puke | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Aadisht

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