For You It Will Always Be Free

Calling Pune a city does it grave injustice. Pune is a kingdom, with its own rules. For example, shops in the commercial hub of this cosmopolitan city shut from 1 pm to 4 pm. Why? Because shop owners need an afternoon nap, and it even has a name in Marathi: vamkukshi!

As a true Punekar, I have laziness deeply ingrained in me. And out of this laziness, the ten-year-old me devised a five-year plan. Don't confuse it with the Soviet-style five-year plans issued by the Planning Commission of India. My plans were much grander.

It all began with a newspaper advertisement for the Kisaan Vikas Patra (KVP), a government scheme that doubled your money in five years.

Those who live by morals and principles might get stuck at the word Kisaan, a farmer. Why would a farmers' scheme interest an urban dweller like me? Well, I had lived long enough in this land of miracles to know you do not need an actual farm to declare yourself a farmer.

My idea was more profound. In this scheme, I envisioned my life of laziness, a life without any real pursuits. All I had to do was find a job that paid twice my monthly expenses.

For the mathematically inclined, here is the plan. My monthly expenses (comics, samosas, etc.) come to two thousand rupees, so I find a job that pays four thousand. Two thousand covers my expenses, and two thousand goes into the Kisaan Vikas Patra every month. After five years, each month's two thousand doubles to four thousand. Two thousand pays my expenses, and two thousand cycles back into the scheme.

Effectively, after five years of work, I never need to work again!

Entropy is an enigmatic concept that even brilliant scientists struggle to explain. All you need to understand is that it works against every system in the universe: chemical reactions, physical fields, planetary motion. Soon I realized it also works against conceptual plans and the dreams of ten-year-old boys. You never see entropy in action. This mysterious force is observed only after the destruction.

The first attack on my plan came from the government. They increased the Kisaan Vikas Patra's doubling period from five years to six.

A year of extra work for a Punekar like me is akin to criminal punishment. Still, the reward was a lifetime of laziness, so I reluctantly accepted the additional year.

Just as I was getting through the five stages of grief, a second, far more devastating attack arrived. This time the attacker was Rajkamal Sweets, my favorite samosa joint. They raised the price of my samosa from twenty-five paise to thirty.

An ignorant soul might say, “It's only five paise. Why crib over it?”

But my mathematical knowledge had evolved enough to know that five paise on twenty-five is a whopping twenty percent. My two thousand rupees of monthly expenses became two thousand four hundred, and the four-thousand salary I needed became four thousand eight hundred. That meant twenty percent more work and effort. More effort meant more sadness for me!

My morale had already taken a beating, but my pain was not over. Out of the blue, I took an almost knockout punch to the face. An uncle complained at the counter, “You raised the price by five paise last year. Now you're raising it again?” The owner tried to soothe him: “Bhaisaab! That was two years ago, not one.”

My only thought was: This price rise thing will repeat itself!

I was in utter shock and lost my appetite. Without ordering the samosa, I walked home thinking, “How much will I have to earn if this keeps happening?”

Compound interest was yet to be taught at school. So, like a primitive caveman, I worked out what five paise every two years would mean. My calculation filled a whole page.

In fifty years, my samosa would cost an astronomical one rupee and fifty paise, six times the original twenty-five paise samosa.

My monthly expenses would explode from two thousand to twelve thousand, which meant I needed a salary of twenty-four thousand!

Adversity tests the true mettle of a man, and I took up the challenge. I needed to find out which job pays twenty-four thousand rupees a month, so I undertook a street survey.

That day I realized I dwelled amongst highly ignorant people.

The next few weeks were tumultuous. With my questions unanswered and no clear path, restlessness boiled within me. Then, by God's grace, I got a lifeline: expert advice.

A celebrity guest arrived in our colony to visit his uncle for a week. The moment the news got out, his appointment schedule filled up. Everyone in the colony took turns to meet him, pay their respects, and seek guidance from this great man.

Don't even entertain the thought that I mean a baba or a jyotishi. The nineties were a time when knowledge and education were still respected. The celebrity enjoyed his exalted status because he was a graduate of IIM. Don't pronounce it “eemm.” The correct way is “Aye Aye YAM.”

It was an occasion to rise above the mediocre folk around me. I used the extra puran poli at our house as a bribe to enter his uncle's home and pushed my way up his meeting schedule. When I found the great man alone, I posed my query concisely.

In the dismissive fashion elders use on children, he replied, “It's not your age to think about such things. Go and play.”

People discriminate against those shorter than four feet. But I persisted.

“It's an important matter. My samosa went up by five paise last month. I need to know how much pocket money to ask for next year.”

He relented once he understood it concerned the all-important samosa. He explained that what I was experiencing is called inflation: a fall in the power of money. My money's ability to buy a samosa had fallen. Inflation, he said, is monitored by the Reserve Bank of India, the “aar-bee-aye.”

The RBI is mandated to keep inflation below five percent. “Five percent is a good barometer for you, young man,” he said.

The only thing I learned from that conversation was that the aar-bee-aye is not to be trusted. Five percent! Really? My samosa had become twenty percent pricier in two years. A simple compounding calculation told me that was more than nine percent a year. What dream is everyone living in, claiming a five percent target? And they say young people have wild imaginations!

Disillusioned, I went back to Rajkamal Sweets to finally eat that samosa. I hoped its energy would light up my brain, because I still needed the path that was eluding me: how to earn twenty-four thousand a month?

There I spotted the same uncle, arguing at the counter again.

What was happening? Now even the potato inside my samosa was shrinking. Much later, I learned economics has a term for this, where the samosa shrinks to balance costs: shrinkflation. But in that moment, I was just angry at the uncle. He had become my bad-luck sign, and I vowed never to go near him again.

The next day, amid all this turmoil, I chanced upon a newspaper headline:

My eyes lit up. Fifty thousand for one painting! That was more than two months of my twenty-four-thousand dream salary, earned in one go. All these months I had wondered whether to become an engineer or a doctor to earn twenty-four thousand a month. Or should my career path include history or geology? But the answer was painting. The article carried a picture of the painting in question. They said it was abstract art. I didn't understand what it was, but I had no other option. For my plan to work, I had to embrace abstract art for six years.

Come to think of it, art isn't that bad. Compared to the manual labor of an engineering floor or a doctor's operating table, the canvas seemed a comfortable choice. Becoming an artist was now my motto.

But therein lay a problem. I am incapable of using color. Crayons are okay, sketch pens are tolerable, but watercolors are beyond me. Those cakes of color and that ill-designed palette: how much color, how much water? No guidance at all. Water flows freely, while the solid cakes of color sit in tiny slots. You brush a few droplets into one cake and watch in frustration as the water runs into the next. By Murphy's law, the cake you are brushing refuses to liquefy, while the neighbor that caught an accidental spill oozes color like the Ganges in flood. In all this commotion the colors mix, and you get an unintentional, undefined color. I hope it's clear why I can't use color. A significant handicap for someone intending to become the next M F Husain.

But my determination would power me through. That day in drawing class, I was on fire. I drew a red rose on a neatly drawn stem, the ultimate expression of love. But I was gunning for abstract art that afternoon. So I painted the rose red and went full “modern art” on the stem, painting it brown like a tree trunk.

I saw my painting as a perfect symphony of art, a future record bid at Sotheby's. My teacher saw a giant rose on a pipal tree. She expressed her emotions with her hand on my cheek, and my equally strong emotions flowed rapidly from my eyes. She insulted me further by displaying my art to the whole class, who joined in with peals of laughter. To stifle my creativity completely, she shredded my painting with the passion of a tigress devouring her prey.

After school, a dejected, red-eyed, dehydrated me reached home with defeat written on my face. My mother saw me, hugged me at once, and asked, “What happened?”

I couldn't control myself. I cried through it and showed her the pieces of my attempt at modern art. She diligently assembled the jigsaw to reveal my painting.

“It's beautiful. So what if the stem is brown? We can recolor it green. And I will talk to your teacher and demand answers for hitting my child.”

In my heart, I knew both statements were only to console me. Parents of that generation never cross-questioned a teacher. And my tryst with watercolors had taught me that brown is a mix of green and red. Even S. P. Balasubrahmanyam sang, in “Saathiya Yeh Tune Kya Kiya,” that two colors once mixed never separate. To turn brown back into green, you need a way to remove red from a color, and that technique has not been invented yet. Still, I needed her consoling words at that moment.

Come to think of it, her use of the adjective beautiful for my painting was another tall story. But again, who cares? Her embrace had already made me emotional. I did not want to leave her hug. I wanted to let go of all my worries. So I told her my tale of turmoil: how my samosa had become pricier, how I needed to earn twenty-four thousand a month, and how nobody seemed to know how to get such a job. I even told her about inflation and how confusing it was.

She gave me a patient hearing and said, “Don't worry, dear. We will figure out a way.”

That evening, I didn't leave her side. She took a good handful of raisins and steamed them, boiled a fresh batch of potatoes, and rolled pure wheat flour into a dough. Most importantly, she consulted me on how many raisins and how much potato should fill each triangular fold. Soon a freshly fried, hearty samosa was in my mouth. It was amazing, better than Rajkamal's. I savored every bite.

After a while, though, the economist in me woke up and asked, “How much does it cost to make this at home?”