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ShareAn American professor has researched the differential between the value people place on things that they are given as presents and things they buy themselves.
This doesn't include the chunky diamond ring or the vintage Lamborghini that your sugar daddy might buy you for your birthday because you wouldn't afford them for yourself. He focuses on the clothes, shoes, luxury items, after-shave lotions and bath soaps you could buy and are inevitably given at Christmas.
The research concludes that, for instance, the self-bought sweater is at least 18 per cent more satisfying to me than an equally expensive one bought for me by my sister or daughter. This 18 per cent strikes me as uncannily precise but it is the lowest rung of the discount-in-value ladder. Some presents may carry a 99 per cent devaluation tag.
Being convinced by the good professor, I promptly resorted this Christmas to tell those who threaten to give me presents to rein in generosity and not buy me any 'designer' goods. I don't like wearing labelled sweaters, shirts, jeans, trousers or anything else.
I shy away from brand-identity marks in the form of an animal or the logo-ed initials of the designer on my chest or on my bum. If these designers want people to know that I am wearing one of their products in order to use me, and any allure I might have, as an advertisement for their goods, they'll have to pay me -- as they do Tiger Woods, say.
And as far as reciprocal gifts for my children are concerned, I ask them exactly what they want and take them along to the shop to choose it in the case of a fancy mobile phone handset. Or I simply follow the old Parsi joke which used to interpret the 'RSVP' on wedding invitations as "Rokri Sais Vadharey Pasand", which in crude Parsi Gujarati means, as far as wedding gifts are concerned, "Loose cash much preferred."
Brands are the most inconsequential snobbery of our age. The shirts made by 'masterji' in the local Indian tailor shop are just as fashionable and durable as the ones I have acquired from Emmett or Turnbull and Asser. Masterji nowadays also puts his name proudly on a label inside the collar of the shirt and that's as indiscreet as I like it. The day he insists on embroidering the pocket with a bandicoot or other creature, I move tailors.
In the gestation of my animosity to 'labels' I have encountered the objection that labels mean reliable quality. I have frequently countered this with the boast that the average consumer would not be able to tell a good Chinese imitation from the branded label it has duplicated.
I have tested my argument in the case of handbags and of jeans by offering the 'asli' one and the 'naqli' one to those of my children's generation who insist on their ability to distinguish. The experiment has proved to be convincing by being neutral -- the imitation was chosen as frequently as the 'real' thing.
Bigoted though I am, I am not a relativist in all things. When asked which one thing I learnt at University I may say that I learnt that one poem was better than another. What holds for poems doesn't seem to hold for interpretations of music.
Beethoven's 7th conducted by Karajan can perhaps be distinguished from the same symphony recorded by an unknown Rumanian conductor, but I couldn't for the life of me say which one was 'better'. My son, a musician by trade, says that's because I'm ignorant.
And then there's wine -- is a Sancerre 'better' than a New Zealand Marlborough Sauvignon and could I tell it from our Indian Sula Sauvignon Blanc? (I could actually! -- but will maintain that the Sula Sauvignon is the most drinkable Indian wine -- and herewith declare that I have not been given so much as a paisa or a free drink for saying so -- it's an unbought critical comment.)
The writer is a scriptwriter based in London
