Column

In all the mascara-ed drama about the laying off of young pretty hostesses and smart dude stewards, another story, a far more tragic one, got relegated to the background after its small moment of media attention. Both were connected in a strange, symbiotic way, though only one ended happily, with the slogan-shouting cabin crew getting their jobs back.

Naresh Goyal shed tears for the plight of his staff and took them back; the deaths of four members of the Nair family in a Mumbai suburb went unnoticed by their neighbours and unsung by their other family members, who have not even come forward to claim their bodies. The Nairs, all four of them, were found dead and a note saying they were “frustrated” was found on the spot. Police suspects the parents were killed by the children who then committed suicide. The immediate conclusion the police and the media reached is that they had lost money in the stock market, but the details that later emerged suggest a more complex story.

The parents were in their sixties and their children Sudhir and Shyamala were in their late 40s. Shyamala was a former employee of the public sector company BHEL and by all accounts had done well for herself. She then quit a few years ago to try her hand at business but that did not succeed. Her employers suggested she come back, but she declined.

So far, so normal. But the subsequent revelations were amazing. The Nair siblings, it turned out, had no less than 73 credit cards between them. They had two vehicles, one of them a relatively new Trax and they had also applied for several loans to the banks.
This on top of a loan of Rs 1 crore they had taken to start their business. In short, they were living in hock and were leveraging their cards to get more credit to manage their day to day expenses.

As most of us who use credit cards know, these pieces of plastic can be pretty beguiling. A card gives a momentary sense of financial empowerment and privilege.
Prudently handled, it is a great instrument of convenience. But banks don’t like you if you stay within your limits and pay your bills on time. They look for the spendthrift and the squanderer who spends impulsively and then shells out only a small per centage of the total bill, hoping to pay the rest the next time round. The outstanding mounts, the interest piles up and the debt becomes bigger; it’s bad news for the card holder, good news for the bank.

Banker friends tell me that the latter type is growing faster than the former; there is a straightforward age correlation, in that conservative spenders tend to be older and younger (and first time) credit card holders usually let the payments slide. Similarly, the younger demographic buys impulsively and picks up things he or she cannot afford, while the older one thinks several times before using the card for big ticket items.

But even the most prolific big spender would probably have three to five cards. How did the Nairs get so many of them?More intriguingly, why did they get so many? What was the seductive charm of the credit card that made them apply again and again for that colourful piece of plastic?

Whatever their reasons, it is obvious that they had been swayed by the idea of cheap and easy credit. In the last decade or so, the Indian consumer has fully enjoyed the benefits of a growing economy and the availability of easily available money to buy all the luxuries he wants. Banks now may be behaving in a Scrooge-like fashion, but they were chasing customers till just the other day, practically begging them to take loans to buy vehicles, home theatre systems, expensive holidays, everything to lend some additional glamour to their lives.

The thrift and austerity of a previous generation, which believed in minimal debt, living within their means and not being too ostentatious looked terribly old fashioned. Sticking on to one job became so yesterday. Have money-will-spend was superseded by don’t-have-money-but-will-still-spend. And why not? The party would never end — the jobs, the rising salaries, the booming stock markets, the newer and glitzier gadgets and the easy money — would always be available; wasn’t the India story happening?

Well, the party has ended, at least for the time being and it all happened suddenly. The Nairs ran out of further money to borrow, and Jet Airways decided it couldn’t afford to keep 1900 people on its rolls any more. Job security old-style is over. Goyal has taken his staff back, but the genie is out of the bag; companies will find newer ways to retrench.

Many such stories will be played out in the coming months and years. Like the fall of the Berlin Wall demolished the old certitudes, the mass sacking of hundreds of young, middle-class employees is a small but significant milestone in the new India of the future.
This will now happen again and again. Jet’s staffers should count themselves lucky, the whole country and the government rooted for them. The next time no one will care. As for the Nairs, they will remain an anonymous morality tale in the onward march of a globalising India.

Email: sidharth01@dnaindia.net