From Confused to Confident

By Salil Maniktahla

Valuing the Desi Dollar

As an exercise, I want you to try the following. It'll only take a few seconds of your time, so really...try it out. Google the phrase "Indians are cheap." Read some of the results.

Is your blood boiling yet? If it's not, it's because you didn't actually do it. The amount of vituperation towards our community is just staggering and I don't know if we even realize it. The problem is that there's a difference between being frugal and being cheap. We Desis sometimes don't know the difference.

It's practically a cliché--everyone's got his or her jokes about it. South Asian comedian Russell Peters has a long sketch in his show about penny-pinching. And there's CheapGuju.com. Yeah, Desis the world over can be cheap. As an Indian guy, I know that Indian women in particular think Indian guys are cheap--apparently it's common practice for men to ignore social niceties in favor of filing reimbursement requests on dates for everything from dinners and hotel rooms to drinks and towing charges. Desi women, however, have plenty of cheapness issues of their own, starting with the fact that they often expect Desi men to pay regardless of their own financial means.

Desis have a tradition of being cheap. We rationalize it from plain cheapness to something akin to an actual virtue. Our parents pass down a rich oral tradition of cautionary fiduciary tales. Well, I’m here to point out what might be obvious to some of you. The rest of you need to hang this on your fridge so your whole family can read it when they’re reaching for the burfi: being cheap is no good.

First and foremost, when pinching pennies is your primary consideration, often all other decision-making factors fade into the background. I'm not sure why this is, but consider the following story. My roommate came back from a trip to India recently. He had all kinds of stuff he'd gotten there: shirts, shoes, pants, etc. When he got home, we had what has become a ritual "shopping show-and-tell" where he explains how much he paid for each article and expects me to “ooh” and “aah.” Instead, I mock him and his $10 shoes which invariably last about a month before the glue holding the soles in place dissolves.

The lesson here is: Even if you're cheap, remember that there are other factors that are as important as price. It can cost you more to replace your $10 shoes 4 times (not counting possible orthopedic complications) than to simply buy a good pair of shoes in the first place.

Another problem with being cheap is that you tend to compare apples to oranges in the valuation exercise. While growing up, I had a family friend whose father adamantly refused to let his family go to the movies because "the movie will be out on video soon, and everyone can watch for $3." But isn't that missing the point? Seeing a movie in a theatre is about socializing, meeting your friends and the whole movie-going experience. Qualitatively, it's a bit different from forcing your family to watch a pirated copy of "Dil Chahta Hai" that some schmuck took with his camcorder, just to save a few bucks. Understand that if you look beyond cost, belongings and experiences can have more value than their price tags boast.

We can’t neglect the double standard of cheapness. Yeah, you know what I’m talking about. See, sometimes, the cheapness does not apply to oneself but to others. I know a bride (and groom-to-be) who was rather irate at her parents because they bought a Mercedes just before they slashed her wedding budget. "We just don't have a lot of money," the parents explained. But obviously they did--they just didn't have it for anyone else, not even their own daughter.

ABCDlady took a poll of 50 South Asians, asking them how much they tip servicemen/women that we often come across. See how they compare to our credible source: Emily Post Institute and Tipping.org!

Information provided by CNN Money. Note: Some of the people interviewed are on ABCDlady's staff.

Still another problem with being cheap is that cheap people rarely realize the value of time. The phrase "time is money" has either never occurred to them or simply does not compute. My Indian-shopping-spree roommate once spent over an hour at Best Buy looking for a $10 headset for his phone. When he came home, he found out I had an extra one, so he went back to Best Buy and stood in line for an hour again to return it. To save himself $10, he spent 2 hours of his personal time. That works out to $5 an hour.

Finally, sometimes the promise of free stuff tends to overrule good judgment. My friend was unemployed for quite a while. One of the banes of his existence was the Blockbuster "one-in, one-out" program for $10 a month. You could have unlimited rentals for a month and then cancel at the end of the month. So for a month he gorged himself on movies in order to best capitalize on his $10 investment. He watched a movie a night. He rented ANYTHING and got his money's worth. He did not, however, find a job until after he'd cancelled his Blockbuster membership.

There is no excuse, but cheapness is celebrated in our heritage: our parents are frugal, and our ancestors even more so. I recently read a complaint online saying that Indians don't donate to charity. In my experience, this is true--it's very difficult to motivate my peers to give money to charity, but it's much harder to convince people from my parents' generation to do the same. They simply don't believe in charity, or rather, they believe each person or family is a charity unto themselves. You get what you earn and save through your wits and sweat. That's how I was raised, and I suspect that's how most of the young Desis I know were raised, too.

With time, I think we'll collectively adopt a more mainstream American approach to money. The younger generation is already more prone to financing, credit card debt, and impulse buying than our generation or our parents' generation ever was. Oddly, though, they still sometimes retain the unforgiving attitudes that result in the moniker “cheap.” I was in a restaurant with a younger friend, and he was reluctant to tip the server 15%. I wound up dropping a few dollars on the table as we were leaving out of embarrassment. The waiter has gotta eat, and he gave us ok service--what's the hang-up?

Then I realized that this kid had never waited a table in his life. And is it wrong of me to hope that he does have to at some point later on, rather than having a smooth unblemished career leading straight to management consulting and a BMW and house in the 'burbs’? There's cheapness born from frugality, and then there's cheapness because you grew up privileged--and that's somehow intolerable to me. The cheapness that I’ve been making fun of is a product of necessity. But this? It’s Cheapness for the Ages. It’s gotta go. You hear me, Desis? No more being cheap. Do it for the children!

Salil Maniktahla lives in Washington DC. You can learn more than you ever wanted to know about him and other forces of Good in their constant battle by visiting www.bluntinstrument.net.

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