The loop
   Date :24-Sep-2022

loop 
 
 
 
“TAI, will you come to my son’s birthday,” my maid is asking me. I reply in the affirmative and ask her about the details. To my horror, I find out that she has decided to order a Rs. 2,000 worth customised cake for her four-year-old son! “And just how are you going to pay for the cake?” I ask her and she replies “Tai, I will do it in instalments!”
“Are you mad? You don’t have money to spend on a birthday that your son won’t remember, and you still want to spend such a big amount on just a cake?” My questions just bounce off my maid. She just wants to have the best for son, even if it means stretching her already scarce budget. With a drunkard, non-working husband at home, not once did she think of saving her precious income. And I feel truly sad for her, while I try to put some sense in her and give her some cheaper cake options.
After a while she’s gone, and I realise that this spending outside the budget is not limited to just the below poverty line category. It belongs to everyone in the society. And it happens every day. We all tend to go overboard when it comes to our children. There’s nothing wrong when parents feel that they should give all the luxuries and facilities to their children that they themselves never got in life. We all want the best for them, in all respects. Sadly, the definition of best is now “Costliest.”
It all starts early on, finding the “best” nursery for the little kid. We spend lakhs of rupees each year just for the child to learn the basic alphabets. Very proudly, we show off the annual school fees to friends and relatives. It gives us immense pleasure in telling how far the huge school is from the city and how it takes more than an hour each to and fro. We spend on bus service and also on extracurricular activities, which, somehow aren’t included in the school fees. And it goes on till the kid reaches tenth standard. By this time, the annual fees that is increased by the management at the rate of minimum ten per cent per year, has bloated to such an extent that it can actually cover the cost of an average commerce or arts graduate study! Then comes the dreaded 11th and 12th standards, where the students are enrolled in the “best” tuition classes available. In frenzy, we search the entire city and settle for those classes that have biggest advertisements in dailies and have biggest edifices and most branches in the city. We don’t see the costs, we don’t see the child’s preferences or inclinations, and we don’t see how far it is from our residence. For us, it’s the best and we won’t settle for anything less. The kid who hasn’t given a thought about his future is truly at loss, because then he has to study everything. He will be studying for both the medical and engineering entrance exams, which cost a fortune!
Then come the graduation courses, and maximum of us, belonging to middle class category, have already exhausted most of our savings in our child’s education. We take a huge loan, send our child to the “best” possible college and pay the fees in instalments. And after the child graduates, he goes on with his life, forgetting the troubles we have gone through. Finally, we realise that we have nothing left now for our future as senior citizens. Our savings are gone and so is self-respect. Meanwhile, our child is now buying a huge cake for his own child! And so it goes.