On Gold

For some time now I've been puzzling over ... gold. I have an instinctive and visceral dislike for gold jewellery (and the buying of it!). I was trying to get at the root of it and perhaps I have.

The 'buy gold' logic is very compelling. Your wife wants it. (Well atleast my wife does and so do most of our female relatives and a lot of friends, though I'm sure nowadays a lot of women have managed to stay out of it). As a guy it makes sense because it is an investment and not a consumption expense so you're keeping your wife very happy essentially without spending any money! What a win-win !

So why do I hate it so much.

I think its because all the gold comes out at events like weddings, and women overload themselves massively with it. Gold as ornamentation works upto a certain amount of the stuff ; too much and it takes away from beauty instead of complementing or enhancing it. You are no longer a person, you are a hanger to hang all this gold off of.

The primary function of wearing lots of gold jewellery is to communicate the message: 'I have lots of money'. And that's disgusting.

PS: From Sajini, here's a CBS TV segment on the same topic.

http://youtu.be/sUr2E4dfs0Y

On the cost of clothes

Sometime back I started thinking about this idea below of evaluating how one spends money on clothes. I mentioned it in one of the earlier posts on the blog, but then I continued to think about it and found it more and more interesting, so here's the idea now fleshed out more. The intention to keep detailing it out until I can get something to publish in a peer-reviewed journal :-) ( the Journal of Consumer Economics ?)

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You could evaluate your clothes by dividing the cost of an item by the number of times you wore it. You'd look for a low number to come out of the ratio as that would indicate that it didn't cost you much and you used it a lot, therefore good value. We could call this number the cost per use (CPU). It seems an interesting way to evaluate the worth or the value you get out of it.

I've continued to think about this and find it very interesting. Firstly, you can think about how much money you're wearing everyday. This is the total cost per use of all the things you're wearing (lets restrict it to just clothes, including undergarments and footwear but not jewellery and accessories). I was surprised by the number that I estimated, in my case: greater than 50/-. I wouldn't have thought I was spending that much on clothes every day ! Take a 1500/- Rs pair of jeans which I bought recently ; I'd have to wear it a 100 times for the cost per use to come down to 15/- . I think I'll probably not use it so many times, perhaps 75 times is more like it. So cost per use is Rs 20/-. For other trousers I expect I'll use them even less than 75 times so if they cost the same, the CPU is even higher. A similar calculation for shirts, which could cost 500/- to 700/- for the kind of shirts I wear to work but which I would wear less number of times than trousers before discarding or giving away, perhaps 30-50 times (so CPU average around 15/-). Then calculate the cost for undergarments , shoes/socks, belt . And an unexpected extra, the cost of washing and ironing. Ironing now costs 4/- a garment for me, so that's close to 10/- for ironing itself ! So as I said, adding it all up, a total of Rs 50/- per day.

Its an interesting calculation to do.

The one thing that cost surpringly less for me was footwear. The current pair I use is from Bata, a fairly nice piece that is very reasonably priced at around 450/-. And since I use it everyday pretty much, I've probably used it more than 100 times already, so the cost per wear is down to 4.50 /- already . Very low compared to shirts and pants ! And its in pretty good shape still and could easily go for another 6 months, so the cost per wear is coming down even further. It seems I could cut down the amount I pay on clothes and splurge a little more on footwear, to reach a more optimal point.

For fancy clothes that you wear for special occasions, the cost / use would be much higher than for daily wear clothes. This is because these would be pretty expensive clothes, that we would wear it very few times, so double the effect. For eg. all the suits I've bought, I've used only a couple of times, and then they've gotten too tight for me :-( .

You can start doing this for the other things you buy and use. For example my cellphone cost is horrendous ; each time I've bought a high end phone (both Nokias), I've enjoyed using them a lot but they've lasted relatively short. The first one for eg. cost about 13000 and lasted for about 18 months, so that's close to 750/- per month ! No more expensive phones for me!

From here and there

1.) I started tagging my older posts (scroll down and look for the "Labels" section on the right hand side of this page). Still a huge task if I want to tag all the posts from day 1. However, I'm quite happy to see on going through some of the older posts that I actually like them and find it worth looking at them again. Too often, when I go back to look at something I wrote, I feel nauseated, so this is a good surprise. If/when this exercise is completed it might show some interesting patterns about the kind of things that interest me and that I write about

2.) I went to the other end of town for a meeting today, and bought organic mangoes from the lady of the house who runs a small shop out of the house selling organics. This seems to be a cool idea. Organic food seems particularly amenable to having lots of small neighbourhood shops selling them. I want to set up one

3.) And a note on one of the bees in my bonnet (or should I say closet): clothes. Think about this: you could evaluate your clothes by dividing the cost of the item by the number of times you wore it. You'd look for a low number to come out of the ratio as that would indicate that it didn't cost you much and you used it a lot. It seems an interesting way to evaluate the worth or the value you get out of it. Couple of points: especially for women, I think the value would be concentrated on a low end and a high end, with a dip in the middle, rather than evenly distributed. This is because there would be some pretty expensive thing, and then precisely because it was so expensive, we would wear it very few times, so that its worth by the above calculation would be very high. For eg. all the suits I've bought I've used only a couple of times, and then they've gotten too tight for me :-(. And then you'd have stuff like jeans, whose worth would be very low.

4.) We were at the doctor's clinic over the weekend, when a couple rushed in. Shockingly the lower portion of the woman's sari was completely stained in blood and she was in great pain and moaning. The doctor was quite upset -- this was her consultation clinic with no facilities for taking care of patients and the lady had been sent there mistakenly by a hospital. They were sent off to another nearby nursing home.
It was painful to watch. Since the doctor was a ob/gyn, it was probably a pregnancy or an abortion related problem. The couple was from a lower economic background. A sad reminder of how the other half lives, which we are insulated from, most of the time.

Tried to pick up random images from the web. Do they make or break my point ?

Clothes

Some thoughts on clothes, particularly good clothes.

When we all dress up formally to go for a 'function' or a party, what is the sociological background of the thing. When a whole bunch of people congregate for a marriage, all very well-dressed, I find it looks somewhat absurd, like a charade or a show. Whom are we dressing up for ? What is being achieved by it, especially looking at it a society, what is the usefulness for society ?
Sometimes, there is a background or implicit contest among the women about whose most well-dress or costliest-dressed, but I don't think that's a healthy thing.

Probing a little deeper the question is about the difference between normal dressing and fine dressing by the same people. What is normal dressing (like what we wear when we are in the house, when we go out to do some work, or when we go to work). What happens if we dress 'normally' to a party. What is lost ? A first level answer which seems valid is the straightforward one -- we do some things every day and we do some things rarely. So we may dress more elaborately for those rare and important occasions. But that doesn't seem to be all. When you take the collective of a bunch of people all dressed up, it seems somewhat absurd. But the alternative would be that some people dress up and some people don't and that doesn't sound very sensible either. There would be a jarring lack of consistency.
Perhaps the problem is overdressing which one sees in India nowadays. Clothing that is dramatic and eye-catching is becoming common and its in such a scenario that things look overdone. Would a room of tasteful discreetly well-dressed people gell better ?

And on other fronts ..

Ahem, moving right along folks, from the Jerry Springer episode below.
A few things that have been happening worth mentioning about:

My aunt who lives in a village a few hours from Bangalore fell seriously ill and was brought to Bangalore. They are not well-to-do people. In such a situation, there is a difficult choice, admit her to a very expensive place like Manipal hoping that it will maximize her chances or take her to a less expensive place and feel guilty about it. Luckily that decision didn't fall on me to make (her children live in Bangalore), and things seem to have turned out okay, it looks like it was not a serious illness after all. I would dearly like however to understand better the cost-benefit of varying levels of hospitals. One hears a lot about money-minded doctors but I've not seen anybody try to analyse the situation seriously.

We bought a couple of pillow covers from Fab India . This place focuses on ethnic/handicrafts/sustainable/organic kind of thing. And the difference is, it does it very well. It was started way back in the 1950s and at this point its a very mature, professional organization with retail outlets in good locations in big cities. The things they sell (clothing, linen, carpets, some furniture) are really gorgeous and hi-quality. Expensive too. I'm really happy that a place like this exists and would like to spend a lot more money there.

I went to an exhibition of paintings by about 70 painters based in Bangalore called "Art and the City" at Venkatappa Art Galleries. It was organized by Ananya, a local arts group. I liked the work, it was pretty stimulating. I'm glad to see the vibrant art/drama world in Bangalore. They were raising money for one of their projects, and they found a local industrialist Ravi Cavale who agreed to buy all 140 odd paintings to support their work. Pretty cool. It would have been upwards of 20Lakh I believe. I've been meaning to buy atleast one original piece of art, and there was one at the exhibition I liked that I might've bought if it was available. I also met one of the artists there, Ravikumar Kashi. He was an unassuming pleasant chap and it was good chatting with him. One of the bees in my bonnet is to meet cool/famous people, and this is a nice one. I haven't met many artists so far.