Downgraded to a lifestyle!

I have heard this rhetoric from my friends and colleagues many a times “Why don’t you change that phone?” I take one look at my Blackberry Q10 (that’s sustaining a broken screen at one of the corners) and try to think hard for a few reasons I should switch to a new phone. 

I can make calls using this, it’s a 4G - so I am connected to the world. The QWERTY helps me to type into it quicker and faster and therefore write error-free emails…. Well almost! Though I was a grammar Nazi since school, I do use the standard caveat at the end of all my emails, “Sent from handheld, ignore typos.” The camera is a bit shoddy; but then I have a high-end DSLR to use whenever I wish to take great photos. Fine, I cannot use some of the shopping apps. Then again I look at my phone, and the whole of technology’s conspiracy panning the human race smiles back at me “upgrade and integrate, baby!”

I stand in front of the mirror wondering whether I should team my blue jeggings and moto boots, with my peach anorak or my sheepskin-bomber? Perhaps at the next end-of-season sale, I am going to buy a new trench-coat and blame my purchase on the falling leaves. And suddenly I am staring into the mirror at this strange woman that resembles me, and begin to wonder at what point in thirty-something years of life she had learnt to use such precise fashion jargons to describe a piece of outerwear with approximately the same functionality.

I remember how elated I was when I got my first paycheck! It was my first baby step into a world of personal freedom - freedom to do the things that I would like to do, freedom from waiting for my meager pocket money every week like a wage-worker. That was 2003 – over a decade has passed by hence. My career has given me the opportunity to see the world, to understand how to manage people. But how do I feel about my paycheck? A part of it the government has already grabbed. Add to that the rents and bills to pay – for a nice 3-BHK apartment in the heart of the city, for organic, gluten-free food, for driving a swanky German car. “Of course this month I can also pick up a pair of chic urban furniture through online shopping discounts. Oh and some red wine for the dinner invitation at this colleague’s place! Nah not that much money to spend? How about using my platinum credit card – I can break it out into EMIs” Easy Monthly Instalments. Easy, very easy! As elated as when I got my first paycheck? – Just reached the shopping mall, who has the time to think!

Do you remember the first time you invested some money into your pension account? That was the first time you decided that you will work until you retire no matter what! That investment will be accounted for in your 80C, so that you can save some of your money from being fleeced away by the razing hand of the State. But don’t worry - M/S Freeloader has a different way to dig into your account and take all the money out. There are ads that activate your worst fear - “what happens when I die, is my family secure?” And you buy that much-awaited term plan, further making sure that you take it upon yourself to have a job all your life, no matter what!

Complicating our lives is an easy and convenient trap now. The more we can earn, the more we can afford, the more we are insecure and the more we are trying to buy everything that makes us feel secure – from our lives to our skin color, to the shape of our noses, to the devices that we use.

I am now thinking of this man that I once saw on one of my trips to the mountains – he was carrying a big log of wood on his back strapped and fastened to his head. He had walked several miles up the hill that day to be able to carry that log that would last him a few days of warmth and fire. And I am sitting in my office on the nth floor of a skyscraper (that news tells me is built several kms above an underlying seismic fault line) and wondering how am I better off than that man carrying the piece of log on his back!