There are standards by which people judge your right to exist in a particular era and a certain society. One of the major standards of measure today is your inclination towards vitamin M. No, it is not a new discovery of medicine, but one that has been a prime cause of motivation behind man’s progress and development: Money. Man has constantly strived to better himself in terms of material wealth, and the more digits he adds to his incoming wealth, the more horns he tends to develop on his head! Like a saying in Hindi, for some people, even seven murders are pardoned. This is especially applicable if a person is financially astute, knows how to juggle his pennies, and convert them into something that has more and more value in terms of material wealth. And god help those who are saddled with money to play around with but do not have the faintest of idea, what to do about it!
A friend of mine had some shares invested in her name by her benevolent father-in-law, who spared no opportunity to remind her, that she was a ‘rich lady’ because of these shares, and that she should go through the annual reports of the companies which were being sent to her. This friend of mine would barely glance at the reports and some of them even went unopened, with the old papers! But though she was not interested in share marketing, she was astute enough to calculate other issues in life. Like, how much she had invested in human relationships and how they reaped dividends in terms of emotional interests which far surpassed the quarterly dividends which arrived in her name(which the father-in-law could never comprehend). Though she was dumb not to be unmeasurably grateful to her father-in-law for lending her a paltry sum to book a flat, she did recognize that it was because of the ‘timely help’ that he gave, that she was in possession of the flat today, where her parents’ lived. And so, when her husband lost no opportunity to remind her of this fact, and also at times flung this fact at their faces, she never opened her mouth once, to ask for a financial equivalent for the other ‘timely help’ that she, as a dutiful daughter-in-law, had rendered. She never reminded them that if she had not rushed her mother-in-law to the hospital on time, gangrene would have set in on one of her foot and she would have ended up being a cripple… If she had not insisted on taking her father-in-law for an eye check-up when the doctor pronounced him almost blind in one eye because of a mature cataract, he would have been a one-eyed financial wizard. Was she then really financially as dumb as they made her out to be I wonder ? If she started asking for financial equivalent for all these emotional investments, would they be rich enough to repay her ? Would they be able to compensate her for the emotional upheavals she went through everytime something went wrong in their lives and they blamed her for it ? Could she claim compensation for hours of agony when this very father-in-law made her do things that went against the very grains of her dignity and self-respect ? If she sent an Annual Report to them on her life in their family, would they even read it ? Their investment would be a total zero in the balance sheet which they would see. I wonder, I really wonder who is richer – the father and the son duo, who expected the daughter-in-law to fall at their feet simply because they used her name to invest their money, so that they save tax (and they thought she did not know this ! and that they invested in her name because of love for her !) or the daughter-in-law who cried tears of blood when the father and son duo made her parents feel so obligated towards them because they had ‘invested’ in a flat for which the father-in-law had given the money.
Her parents, who lost sleep day in and day out, simply because the children were undergoing a stressful period in their lives, had left no stone unturned to give them moral support. The repayment at the end of the exile period was this prouncement: “You are staying where you are staying simply because of us because of me and my father”. That brings us to what I mentioned in the beginning of this write-up. If you are not financially astute, you are a fool…. But if you are emotionally deprived, you are a dead piece of wood. And this girl has been living with pieces of wood, all her life!
