Diwali Discounts, and Bargains..!

It’s the festival season and it’s raining discounts and bargains!

I look at huge ads, they show pictures and prices of scores of items that are going cheap. There are beard trimmers at two hundred and forty nine bucks, vegetable cutting machines for less than five hundred, air-conditioners going dirt cheap, T-shirts at one ninety nine, and cricket bats starting at two fifty!

Spectacular I think to myself! It’s a win-win deal, says my greedy, bargaining mind.

“You’ve got every one of them!” whispers my common sense.

Yes, I had all of them, most in working condition, except the beard trimmer which needed a new set of batteries, and what I didn’t have I didn’t need!

I mean I don’t think I’d be able to do much more to my face with the face massager offered at two hundred and fifty, and how many more almonds would I be able to eat, even if they were from California, as the ad said, before I would hear my wife grumble, I ate too much between meals, and that’s why I was so skinny!

We had all grown up on savings and being careful with our money, but today it was all about getting into debt with our credit cards.

The other day I’d seen a neighbor placing some sofas and dining chairs on his terrace. “They seem good!” I said. “The wife’s fed up with them!” he said. “Are they broken?” I asked and sank into one of the chairs, “Very comfortable!” I said.

“Well, she isn’t with them!” he said with a tone of finality, “And I got my bonus yesterday!”

I looked at the poor chairs as they stared back at me, “Thrown out because of a bonus!” they seemed to cry.   

A few years ago, I read a document by Benjamin Franklin in which he called on the American people to build a nation, using hard work and thrift! Yes thrift; not the spending of money on objects which looked a little newer and fancier than what you had but by diligently using money and other resources you had, carefully and not wastefully!

I remember walking into the house of an old couple, whose son in the US was an eminent doctor, and who’d asked me to visit his parents in India. “You live a very spartan existence!” I said looking round their sitting room in surprise.

“Maybe the money we’ve saved on the unnecessary, helped us fund the necessary, mainly our son’s studies!” said the father with a smile.

I turn away from the beard trimmer and vegetable grinding machine seductively glancing at me, and shake my head disapprovingly at a political leader who tells the nation that spending will help boost the economy! ‘Who’s economy?” I ask, “The economy of the Ambani’s Adani’s and Amazon?”

“Thrift will!” I tell her.