I don't have plans or schemes
I don't have hopes and dreams
I don't have anything
Since I don't have you
I am privileged to have the unique distinction of being termed frugal by my family. They cannot seem to understand why my eyes are always fixed on the auto rickshaw's fare meter when we travel, why I switch the bathroom geyser off even before the water is entirely heated and why I search for the cheapest option in every possible scenario. I admit that I am truculent when it comes to frugality and I prefer to inflate the discussion to encompass the trade-off between worldwide consumption versus preservation. I raise my trump cards, namely uncertainty and prudence, every time I am questioned and every time my parents' disdain increases. How can the son of a (hyphen alert) well-to-do, upper-middle-class family act like he's been suffering from a cash crunch all his life?
To answer all the above questions and give you a taste of the dilemma, I'd like to draw your attention to an article on "The Marketing of Frugality" by Mr. Santosh Desai, the author of a popular Times of India column called "City City Bang Bang". Mr. Desai does a quick recce of the current scenario of sustainable development and frugal consumption and puts across a smart and creative idea to help promote frugality. He asks brands to assign a top-notch value to largely plain objects and help people satisfy their needs by using limited resources. Sounds fabulous. Feels marvellous. But, touches on disastrous.
While the idea seems to be a sure-shot solution to satisfy your luxury appetites, it doesn't augur well for your basic necessities of life. Sure, you can ask Apple to make a device using the cheapest materials and call it the iPhone. You're bound to save quite a lot of lithium, sand and steel. But you can't ask your ration shops to enhance the brand value of salt, sugar, oil and rice and ask people to have fewer quantities of these commodities. Which brings me to my new landing point. Do we consume more of basic necessities or are we shifting towards consumption of luxuries? Should we begin branding heavily and be very miserly while using our resources?
To quote practically every movie on this planet, there's good news and there's bad news. While the share of overall demand is largely for basic necessities such as food, clothing, shelter and water, both developed and developing nations are rapidly moving towards luxury consumption. In India alone, the size of the luxury market stood at $18.5 billion in April 2016, according to NITI Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant. That's close to 1% of our GDP. Although that may sound extremely insignificant, it basically meant that if every single Indian earned the same amount of money, then we would all have spent just over a thousand rupees over the year on luxury items.
Even worse news: in most of the world's fastest developing nations, people's needs are fast being replaced by wants and aspirational desires. China, according to a Bain & Company report in 2015, accounted for the largest share of the pie, close to 31%, of total global luxury purchases. And this is where I climb onto the final rung on this ladder of my thought-in-progress. Is our consumption pattern going to jeopardise the world's resources? And are we liable when comes to saving something for our future generations?
Little did Joseph Schumpeter know that when he coined the term "creative destruction", he would be unconsciously fuelling the wants and desires of mankind. Innovation, as he saw it, was the old making way for the new. Obsolescence was the name of the game and nothing could escape it. By that definition, we need not worry about saving up for our children and their children. They will find ways to make use of what is available. They'll probably turn air into a fuel or they'll leave Earth and find another watery planet. Gee, my miserliness sure is hypocritical, ain't it?
I'd like to wrap this piece up with a quick summary. The economic rationale for being frugal is nurtured by the fundamental postulate of limited and scarce resources. Our wants and needs are unlimited but we are limited by the raw materials that we require, thus making a strong case for frugal consumption. However, creative destruction continues to deliver on its bumper sticker that says that we need not worry about how to satisfy our needs because innovation is the catalyst that will help us make ends meet. The thought-in-progress is now evenly balanced between the logic of frugality and the promise of prodigality. I don't have anything that fully answers the questions posed and since I don't have you, I might as well wallow in Axl Rose's angst.