How I Messed Up My (Financial) Life

A graphic account of a typical Indian male who began his career at 19 in the late 1980s and is now at crossroads.

- A Saye Sekhar

It was well past the noon and the chilly winds blowing from the just-then-mounted central air-conditioner system made the environs chillier. The weather in Hyderabad too was cool with the wintry pre-evening winds blowing cold. It was exactly a month since I was revelling in the joy of my ‘chivalrous’ act of conquering the contest and landing the job that’s glamorous in its own way.

It was robotic practice for the newspaper organization I had joined in 1988 to make the payment of salaries on the last working day of the month. The company never missed this cut-off day for the five and a half years I had served. Even now I hear that they never miss the payday date.

I had signed on a 20-paise revenue stamp and took the oblong-sized pink cover in which a cyclostyled proforma pay-slip with details of break-up written with a pen and cash were packed. It was my first time, my first salary. A remuneration for my services for one full month. My eyes glittered and the clerk may have seen many of my ilk in his over five years of stint by then.

First salary

It was Rs 700 of training allowance after a deduction of profession tax of Rs 20 and ESI cutting of Rs 30.

I vividly remember this as this was the first time I was earning money of my own in my life. I was barely 19 by then. I am not too sentimental in the sense that I don’t belong to the genre of those who think they should give some money to God, buy a saree for the mom and a pair of clothes for the dad with the first salary. As the days passed by, I moved to a shared bachelor accommodation from an aunt’s house, as my parents lived in another town.