They are coming back. Recharged. Reinvigorated. Flabbier. Their pockets emptied. They are returning to their routine and if some magazine would ask them to please jot down ‘A day in the life of…,” it could be like: 6 am – wake up; 6.15 – to work; 9 am – still on the highway; 11 am – reached office; 12 – client meeting; 2 pm – back to office; 3 pm – client meeting; 4 pm – on Garhoud Bridge; 5 pm – still there; 6 pm – back to office; 9 pm – on the way home; 11 pm – reached destination; 12 am – hunting for parking spot; 1 am – hit the sack.
Wistful tales of rains, greenery and home, sweet home might enliven offices for a few more days before everyone gets back to sheer work, weekend stage shows and cricket matches.
The banks were kind enough to waive off loan repayment during vacation months; they will get to you with reinforced vigour. Credit cards are to the brim; time for a fresh one; rents haven’t dipped so moneybags are to be tapped – oh, oh, why must every one rue about dwindling financial resources, isn’t the sand and sun out there? Enjoy. Recall for a moment Fyodor Dostoevsky’s observation: “Man is fond of counting his troubles but he does not count his joys.”
Counting the joys comes with a sizing up of one’s own fortunes, setting up a relative scale of poverty. Why must that boy, not too long ago seen in his diapers, own a flat, ride a Hyundai, get a fat pay cheque – all back home, when me, the object of his adulation, still drive a Mark 4 Ambassador? But, as a colleague observed, these young ones, who earn in mini-millions, have lost the joy in the sheer “sense of possession.” They buy because they feel like.
A refrain by Indian expatriates, especially those fresh from their vacation, is that “every one is happy” back home. Their benchmarks are sometimes laughably simplistic: The wayside labourer who heads with his day’s earning straight to the pub waving a Rs500 note; the young IT buffs who switch cars virtually every other day; the air of confidence that prevails among whatever category of workers you meet – journalists who speak of boom-time in Mumbai, bankers who just can’t stop smiling, government employees who discuss how a year passed with 141 days of strike apart from the holidays…
The ease with which money is flaunted makes any NRI dread. Psyched up by the reverse conversion factor (making a shirt’s price come with three zeroes instead of the one (or two) zero expats are used to) they hold on to the petrodollars, which as bottom lines go, had helped build the land.
Indian expats can easily wear the Uncle Leo XII complex (from Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera): “I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing…”
They aren’t being miserly. Just scared. That is what they all are – scared of the future.
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