Life in the slow lane

A two-day weekend was not the norm when I was a kid.  At least, that's how I remember my childhood.  Sunday was a day off from school.  And only the second Saturday of every month was a holiday.

What did we do those Sundays and that lucky Saturday every month?

We helped my father dust and clean our home.  In my tweens, that dusting operation is how I found out that I have intense allergies to cobweb dust.  The reaction was so intense once that I had to be taken to the hospital for an intravenous shot.  My father and sister sneezed and carried on!

Some Sundays we had luxurious oil treatment.  We rubbed the warmed up oil all over and let the skin soak it all up for maybe a half an hour, some of which was spent under the sun sitting on the washing stone in the backyard.  We read a magazine or a book while letting the oil do its job.  And after washing up, we sat down for amma's special Sunday meal.

I am sure that my sister listened to the radio in the afternoon, as she did in the evening and night too.  Amma read her magazines.  Appa wrote letters to the extended family.  My brother and I would start playing chess and end up fighting, or we would play badminton and end up fighting, or fight just because.  It was not unusual for friends to drop in for a visit in the evening.

That was the weekend.

It is a contrast to the life that most of us lead now.  We think that puttering at home is not enough of an activity for the weekend.  "What are your plans for the weekend" is a typical question at the grocery talk small talk and among colleagues and friends.

Why are we uninterested in a slow-paced life and economy? 

Simply because we want more.  We want to consume more.  We want to shop for things, even if we don't need them.  We want to eat out even when we know it will be unhealthy for our health and the pocketbook.  We need to keep up with the Joneses.  We know “we must stop shopping, and yet we can’t stop shopping.”

Aswath Damodaran, a professor of finance at the Stern School of Business at New York University, grew up in Chennai, India, in the 1960s and predicts that in the wake of a drastic contraction in consumption, cities would most likely resemble the Chennai of his childhood: “There were no toy stores. Three restaurants for a city of millions. One bookstore, because who needs books?”

Damodaran, from my old country, is being true to his business school thinking and warns that without all of us spending our money, we won't have restaurants round the corner and kids won't have toys.  And that is a problem because ...?  Incidentally, we had all the toys that we needed.  And most of them were made of wood and not plastic, which threatens our lives.

We have granted money and economics way too much importance in life and in our collective decision making.  Even this atheist worries that we worship the market.  I will be happier if the faithful were sincere in their faith; after all, every old religion advises people not to be obsessed with money.  The world has enough and more to help out those who don't.  But, of course, there are lots of privileged people who oppose helping out fellow humans.

I don't imagine that we will change our ways of thinking.  I am sure that even now kids have a hard time imagining the kind of childhood that I had.  In a few years, there won't even be people with firsthand experiences of such lives.  

So ... what are your plans for the weekend? ;)