Column

In Mumbai, nobody ever makes it to the headlines for spending Rs1.5 lakh. Tossing away money is mandatory if one wants to flaunt the arriviste image and earn passage into the page-3 pantheon. But some throw away so much money that they need to get that 16th credit card just to retain the arriviste status.

The paradox brings to mind the Miss Universe UK 2008, Lisa Lazarus, who deigned to descend to India, from whichever universe she was the miss of, only after security for her was beefed up. She was supposed to shoot for some Bollywood film whose producer immediately produced the said beef. He hired four bouncers at the cost of Rs2 lakh.

The producers would not have cared much about the trivial expense, but would have surely congratulated themselves for getting a woman who held the universal franchise on beauty for 2008, to the city. Mumbai, in other words, values status more than money.
Now, is that not a yawn-inducing universal truth? It might be, but it deserves another look in these times of recession.

Nobody noticed the Rs2 lakh spent on Lisa Lazarus, but everybody was exercised by the expenditure of Rs1.5 lakh that I mentioned at the beginning of this write-up. Well, the precise figure is Rs1,40,000 that was paid by a Mulund cobbler, on Thursday, to book a high-end version of Nano.

The cobbler, a gentleman by the name of Maruti Bhandari, had been saving for years, and was able to brush aside the swarms of loan agents and present a cheque for a one-shot payment. The papers, and indeed some TV channels, began to flash the story. The chassis of the media presentation was Bhandari's humble origins and the seemingly filmi financial miracle that put him into the league of lakhs of middle-class folks whose incomes were infinitely higher than that of an average Mumbai cobbler.

There, the spirit of Mumbai had triumphed again and a man who fixed designer shoes, was joining the sweaty, asphyxiating gridlock peopled by those who wore those kind of shoes.

Absolutely absurd. Mumbai had nothing to do with Bhandari's financial miracle. It was, in fact, no miracle at all. Bhandari worked hard and saved; then he worked even harder and saved some more. In America, such attributes constitute what is called the Protestant Work Ethic. It is the spirit of diligence and self-denial that mitigates the shock of a meltdown for a family.

Bhandari followed these simple rules: All hard work brings profit; but mere talk leads only to poverty. If you buy things you don't need, you'll soon sell things you need. Don't save what is left after spending; spend what is left after saving.

This is not the mumbo jumbo of some swami. These are the observations of Warren
Buffet.