I have often felt that the free market thrives on middle class snobbery. Many of the middle class people buy things only because their neighbours have bought them. If the middle class Mr A and the middle class Mr B are neighbours and Mr A buys a car, Mr B too will have a car within weeks, even if he doesn’t know driving and even if he doesn’t need a car and can’t afford to have it. And most probably Mr B must have bought it by availing a car loan. The pattern is as following:
I am not as wealthy as our neighbour is. I am a school teacher and he is a businessman. I can’t afford to have what he can. And yet as he bought an inverter last year, I didn’t like to spend the power-cut hours in the candle light. I too bought inverter. My wife told me that we had not finished our home loan repayment and we can’t afford to buy things we don’t need. She asked how I had paid the cash. I didn’t tell her that I hadn’t paid the cash. It would be paid. And I have been living in peace when suddenly, my daughter told me that she had seen her friends (my neighbour’s children) playing games on a laptop.
We have a desktop in our home and it was enough for our needs and my daughter was content with it. But the fact my neighbour’s having a laptop started nagging me. I enquired the price of laptops. I applied for a loan from my PF. When my wife knew it, she asked me: “Will you buy an elephant if he buys one?” I really like elephants,” I replied, “And I have always liked to have one.”
And the businessman indeed bought an elephant! He bought the pachyderm as he found that an elephant brings good amount of money during the festival season as rent for parading it. The elephant was tied to the tamarind tree in his compound. I thought that he was trying to ruin my peace of mind and the stability of my economy. Secretly I inquired about the price of the elephants. Oops! How many lakhs! When I retire, I would have gratuity and other earnings to buy one, I thought. Buying an elephant may be easy but maintaining won’t. It is better to stop competing with others, my conscience told me. That is the only way to win this unhealthy competition.
And when my wife mockingly asked me whether I had applied for an ‘elephant loan’, I took one of my favourite authors Clive Hamilton’s book Growth Fetish from my collection of books and showed her the sentence: “People buy things they don’t need, with money they don’t have, to impress people they don’t like.” “It seems Hamilton knows you personally,” my wife laughed.
Sukumaran C V
Email:lscvsuku@gmail.com