By Debashis Chatterjee
I decided one day to see if I could live in a city in India for a couple of days spending no more than Rs 50 a day. The idea took shape in my leadership class at IIM. I challenged my secondyear MBA class to take up a project that required them to change one aspect of their behaviour or lifestyle. As the course teacher I could not hope to lead change until I changed something about myself. Hence the resolve to have three meals in a day in an Indian town or city for less than Rs 50. In Mumbai, I got down from the airport-bound taxi near Dharavi (a large slum area).
I walked from morning till late night. What was significant was that I could rethink my assumptions about what it means to ‘eat out’. I realized how often I had ended up buying food that I wouldn’t fully eat with money that was hardly a measure of the satisfaction one got out of eating. One realized that the greatest appetizer was indeed hunger. Here are my expenses on my three meals for a day: Breakfast: poha + tea = Rs 20 Lunch: vada pav = Rs 14 Dinner: 1/2 plate pav bhaji = Rs 16 This experiment in austerity concluded with drinking water that was ‘recycled’ from a fire hydrant close to a colony.
In another day’s experiment in the touristy town of Waynad in Kerala I discovered one can still live for about Rs 50: Breakfast: tapioca or two idlis + Tea = Rs 15 Lunch: sada vegetarian meal = Rs 20 Dinner: 2 chappatis + curry juice = Rs 15 Getting clean water was less of a hassle and it came free with the meal. A very thin line separates our prosperity and poverty.
Those who have less in India have to wait long hours for virtually everything — from drinking water to daily ration. For those who have more, waiting becomes more subtle: waiting in bumper-tobumper traffic inside air-conditioned cars; waiting for an elusive bonus; waiting for a web page to load; or waiting for the results of a dreaded blood sugar test. There is a psychological and economic cost to all such unproductive waiting. There are two ways of dealing with the anxiety of having to wait interminably. The first way is to remove all evidences of the flow of time from the scene of waiting. The casino parlours in Las Vegas play this trick of the mind on gamblers to keep them in the casinos for long hours.
There are no clocks or open windows to reveal the time of the day in most casinos. The first way is about keeping the mind engaged by multiplication of wants. The second, and perhaps the more sustainable way, is thoughtful minimisation of wants.
If we have a chance to reflect, more will appear to be less if we take into account the psychological stranglehold of stressful commutes, disjointed double-income families and lifestyle diseases such as affluenza! Many would want to work in a market economy where we maximise profits and incomes.
But how many of us would want to live in a market society where money is the only measure of human relationships? Finally, as we wound up the class we realized that human motivation was a constant oscillation of our mental pendulum between two extreme questions: how much more do we need to be really happy; and, how much less can we have and still be happy?
The writer is a director at IIM Kozhikode
I decided one day to see if I could live in a city in India for a couple of days spending no more than Rs 50 a day. The idea took shape in my leadership class at IIM. I challenged my secondyear MBA class to take up a project that required them to change one aspect of their behaviour or lifestyle. As the course teacher I could not hope to lead change until I changed something about myself. Hence the resolve to have three meals in a day in an Indian town or city for less than Rs 50. In Mumbai, I got down from the airport-bound taxi near Dharavi (a large slum area).
I walked from morning till late night. What was significant was that I could rethink my assumptions about what it means to ‘eat out’. I realized how often I had ended up buying food that I wouldn’t fully eat with money that was hardly a measure of the satisfaction one got out of eating. One realized that the greatest appetizer was indeed hunger. Here are my expenses on my three meals for a day: Breakfast: poha + tea = Rs 20 Lunch: vada pav = Rs 14 Dinner: 1/2 plate pav bhaji = Rs 16 This experiment in austerity concluded with drinking water that was ‘recycled’ from a fire hydrant close to a colony.
In another day’s experiment in the touristy town of Waynad in Kerala I discovered one can still live for about Rs 50: Breakfast: tapioca or two idlis + Tea = Rs 15 Lunch: sada vegetarian meal = Rs 20 Dinner: 2 chappatis + curry juice = Rs 15 Getting clean water was less of a hassle and it came free with the meal. A very thin line separates our prosperity and poverty.
Those who have less in India have to wait long hours for virtually everything — from drinking water to daily ration. For those who have more, waiting becomes more subtle: waiting in bumper-tobumper traffic inside air-conditioned cars; waiting for an elusive bonus; waiting for a web page to load; or waiting for the results of a dreaded blood sugar test. There is a psychological and economic cost to all such unproductive waiting. There are two ways of dealing with the anxiety of having to wait interminably. The first way is to remove all evidences of the flow of time from the scene of waiting. The casino parlours in Las Vegas play this trick of the mind on gamblers to keep them in the casinos for long hours.
There are no clocks or open windows to reveal the time of the day in most casinos. The first way is about keeping the mind engaged by multiplication of wants. The second, and perhaps the more sustainable way, is thoughtful minimisation of wants.
If we have a chance to reflect, more will appear to be less if we take into account the psychological stranglehold of stressful commutes, disjointed double-income families and lifestyle diseases such as affluenza! Many would want to work in a market economy where we maximise profits and incomes.
But how many of us would want to live in a market society where money is the only measure of human relationships? Finally, as we wound up the class we realized that human motivation was a constant oscillation of our mental pendulum between two extreme questions: how much more do we need to be really happy; and, how much less can we have and still be happy?
The writer is a director at IIM Kozhikode
