Money

Money is an amazing thing. Although understanding money and financial instruments is so fascinating and so rewarding, it still remains an area which is studied and implemented only by specialists. The common man either ignores it or the little more concerned one at least listens to the life insurance agent. And of course everybody goes to a CA at the end of the year! (Assuming you aren’t like one of the guy I met, who even after earning for 3 years never cared to file his income tax refund and got his PAN card only after the company deducted 10,000 bucks to comply with the GOI rules).

I heard one person say, “I don’t understand banking. I only know how to withdraw money from my ATM and that is all that I need”. Few people know or really want to know about the financial instruments they can take advantage of. Alas, these people are missing out on one of the most enriching and rewarding things in life.

I started my journey with formal financial training when I was 9. My grand father (GF) opened a savings account for me in the Bank of Baroda. It was thrilling for me to have a bank account of my own. By then I only had a vague idea what a bank was, but that act of my GF changed everything. At the time of festivals, birthday, examination results, I used to get small amounts of money from all my close relatives. Those 10, 50, 100 bucks you get when you reluctantly bend to take the blessings of your elders ;) My father had also got me an earthen savings pot at home. It was an earthen pot with a slit at the top to put in money, usually change money in terms of coins. And the ‘catch’ was the pot had to be broken to take the money out, so everybody including my parents themselves were restrained to take it out before it filled up. Once in a while, my parents used to put in the coins there and I anxiously waited for the pot to fill up and then do the honors ;) When the pot finally opened, it poured out such a sum of money actually unimaginable considering the amount which was put in at a time. Counting these coins by making separate ‘buildings’ of them of 25ps, 50ps, 1rs , 2rs made a good time pass and the best thing was I exchanged these ‘buildings’ with my grand mother to get crisp notes which I happily went and deposited in my bank account.

My GF had told me that yours is a ‘minor’ account with him as the guardian so both of us could put in the money but only he could withdraw it. That you will say was unfair but I had complete faith on my GF, even so more than my parents ;) Year after year I kept on increasing my bank balance until I realized when I was old enough that I was not left with anything at hand! So by the time I was in say 7th, I cheekily set aside some of it for my personal expenses and put the rest in my account. All this while, GF used to give me checks which I needed to deposit in his account. He made me do operations of Demand Drafts, Fixed deposits, his pension account and also updating of passbooks a whole lot of times. What this did to me is that I learned all simple banking transactions quite early in life. And now I know that I was eligible to withdraw money when I was 10!! My GF must have done this for all the good reasons ;)

Maturing from here to FDs, RDs, Insurance, MFs, Income Tax was all that more easy and interesting to me. I owe a lot to my GF and my parents who taught me the basics of money.

Learning to value, save and grow money is one of the most important things one should learn in life.

Three cheers to SRK

An overtly rude lady was the lucky one yesterday in the immensely popular KBC. Throughout the show, she behaved very aggressively, too overconfident and showing little respect to one of Bollywood's greatest superstar. One one occasion, when asked how many numbers are there with 9 in them from 1 to 100, she took an audience poll ! After the poll, when SRK suggested that she could have counted it herself, she said, "Maine audience ko ginane ka waqt diya tha, ki farak peenda hain!". You couldn't but LOL !!

SRK, started a practice in which he asked participants to give him a hug and leave when they wanted to quit with the sum of money they had already won and did not wanted to take any risk. When this lady wanted to quit, she said, "Mein koi risk nahi lena chahati, magar mujhe tumse yaha gale milane ka koi showk nahi, I Quit." SRK was obviously taken aback by such a rude statement, may be he felt intimidated too and his face showed it all.

I thought , that lady has got the better of shahrukh. He had been ruthlessly shown disrespect to him on national television. Stepping into the shoes of the Big B, questions were already being raised about SRK's capabilities. He had to do something to maintain audience appeal.

As the lady got up to receive her check of 12,50000/- SRK cheekily said, "Agar mein ye check apaki mataji to du to theek hain ?" on which the lady caught unawares, casually agreed and then came the strike of a master. "Kyoki vo mujhase jaroor gale milegi!". The crowd rose in laughter, cheer and applaud for the witty comment. After this, SRK came back to the lady and delivered the final blow, "Beti ne nahi diya to maa ne de diya, ki farak peenda hain ! ".

SRK did this in tremendous style, attitude and humour. It was surely difficult to come out of such a situation, but he did that with panache. He got his late life lessons of TV hosting but also received cheers from a million hearts ;)

Chaos

You have a boulevard. Keep huge rolling wooden logs in the middle of that road. Put in some smaller varieties of those logs which can roll a bit faster. Now if water starts flowing from one end not hard enough to blow these logs away, you can imagine how it will fill the gaps and race ahead of everybody.
When the huge load of vehicles start flowing in the morning, I always have this scene in my mind and I have imagined it from quite some time now. To clear the analogy, the big logs are the busses and the trucks, smaller logs are the cars, jeeps, tempos and autos while the water symbolizes two wheelers.

Chaos! That’s the only way I can describe the traffic in this part of the world. By ‘this part’, I may be referring to my route to office everyday but this is pretty much the case anywhere in India. I have seen it in Pune & Mumbai and now here in Bangalore. Many a times, I give a thought to it. Why are so many people so eager to race against everybody? What bounty awaits us at our destination which makes us so very impatient? No Clue.

We always start from the traffic signal when it is still some 5-7 seconds remaining, always go past the signal when it is well past 5-7 seconds that the red has come back again. Overtaking from left or from right has no meaning what so ever. Lane discipline? I bet we have a survey in Bangalore and most of them would have heard the word for the first time, some people (of whom I claim to be a part of) would conveniently blame it on the others. My usual justification whenever I break a lane is, “What the hell, nobody is following it.” What difference can I make other than thinking of myself to be an eternal fool as others race past me?

Pedestrians are the most hated creatures for many a vehicle drivers. Such is the plight of the people that crossing a road is something for which we should have a separate clause in Insurance agreements. One of my friends in office says, “Bangalore mein hath dikhake road cross karma padata hain”. (You have to wave your hands and beg the traffic for you to cross the road). True. Equally chaotic are the pedestrians. Overhead bridges don’t exist on most occasions and at some places where they do, it seems to be too much of a trouble for us! Why go up and down? Just wave your hand and barge into the chaos, fate will take care of you and the motorist!

I sincerely try many a times not to follow suit and am successful most of the times. But there are times when you forget about everything and join in the bandwagon. That is where India lags behind and I fast forward zip, zap zoom…