By Dr. R. Balasubramaniam 

There is a particular variety of human being that the great Indian experiment has produced with remarkable consistency over the last several decades and I have the dubious honour of being a specimen in reasonably good working condition.  

We are the middle-class Indians, a tribe so distinct in our habits that anthropologists, had they bothered to study us, would have written entire treatises on our peculiarities. We are the people who will fly business class on an upgrade and still pocket the complimentary slippers, dental kit and that strange little eye mask which we will never use but cannot bear to leave behind. 

My education in middle class economics began at the dining table, where my mother had established certain inviolable laws of physics. The first law stated that no grain of rice shall be left on the plate, for somewhere in the world a farmer had toiled and to disrespect his labour was to invite cosmic consequences of an unspecified but terrifying nature.  

The second law decreed that leftover food was not waste but raw material for the next morning’s creative experiment. Last night’s dal would mysteriously reappear as today’s parathas and yesterday’s vegetables would find themselves reincarnated as a perfectly acceptable upma. Nothing died in our kitchen. Things merely transformed, like souls awaiting their next birth. 

The wardrobe was an even more  sophisticated ecosystem. My elder brother’s shirts, having served their primary purpose, would descend upon me with great ceremony, somewhat like family heirlooms but with mended collars. By the time these garments reached me they had acquired character, history and that particular softness which only comes from being washed approximately four hundred times.  

I wore them with the quiet dignity of a man inheriting his ancestor’s robes, blissfully unaware that other children were apparently wearing clothes purchased specifically for them. The very idea seemed exotic, almost decadent. Why would anyone buy a new shirt when a perfectly good one was waiting to be passed down? 

School textbooks followed the same principle; except they came with bonus features. My brother had thoughtfully underlined important passages, drawn moustaches on historical figures and occasionally inserted commentary in the margins that ranged from useful to unprintable.  

Reading these books was like attending a parallel education, where alongside the official curriculum I received an alternative perspective on Mughal emperors and the laws of thermodynamics. The cost of education in our household was approximately one set of books per generation, which now strikes me as a model of sustainability that the United Nations might consider studying. 

Birthdays were celebrated with a precision that NASA would have admired. There was the new shirt, stitched by the same tailor who had been measuring me since I was old enough to stand still. There was the special meal, which meant the regular meal plus one additional sweet item. There was the crisp ten rupee note from an uncle, presented with such gravitas that I treated it like venture capital. That money would be saved, considered, agonised over and eventually spent on something I had been eyeing for three months.  

The joy was not in the spending but in the deliberation. Modern children spend more money in a single visit to a mall than I spent in my entire teenage years and they seem somehow less happy about it. 

Environmental consciousness was not a movement we joined but the air we breathed. We switched off lights when leaving a room, not because Greta Thunberg told us to but because my father would otherwise deliver a lecture comparing electricity bills to national budgets. Water was precious, plastic bags were washed and reused until they achieved a kind of transparent immortality and the concept of throwing away anything that could conceivably be useful was treated as a moral failing.  

My mother kept jars of buttons, lengths of string and pieces of cloth whose original purposes had been lost to history, but whose potential utility remained eternal. The circular economy was not invented in some Scandinavian think tank. It was perfected in middle class Indian households long before anyone gave it a fancy name. 

The strange thing is that none of this felt like deprivation. We were not poor. We simply understood that resources were finite and that wastefulness was a kind of crime against the future. Money, when it came, was treated with respect rather than worship. You could have it without flaunting it, save it without hoarding it, spend it without losing your head. 

I look at myself today and realise that I am still that boy who cannot bear to throw away a half-used notebook, who feels a small pang of guilt when food is left on the plate, who switches off lights in empty rooms even in hotels where I have paid for electricity. These are not eccentricities. They are the quiet inheritances of a particular kind of upbringing and I have come to see them not as limitations but as the deepest form of freedom.  

The middle class taught me that contentment is not what you accumulate but what you can do without and in a world drowning in excess, that may be the most subversive lesson of all. 

[Dr. R. Balasubramaniam is the Founder of Swami Vivekananda Youth Movement (SVYM). ‘The Lighter Side’ is a series of satirical articles meant to bring a smile by highlighting the funny side of everyday life.]