“I'm rich enough that I didn't ask the price of a loaf of bread at a farm stand and accidentally bought an $18(!!!) loaf of sourdough but not so rich that I haven't stopped thinking about it for the past 24 hours.” ~ @karol

That's me these days ;)

Recently I seem to be talking much more openly about one aspect of my early life than I used to, be it on this blog or in the real world. That aspect is finances or money. It has made me wonder why I used to be closed on this topic before or why I have felt like I could open up in recent times.

One big reason I believe is the culture in India where I grew up and which subconsciously deeply ingrained in me certain ideas about wealth and the lack of it. It wasn't something that my elders told me or that I learnt in school or that was mentioned explicitly. Like a lot of cultural ideas, it got passed on in an implicit way, so much so I did not realise I had them until I started living in a different one. The idea—put in very loose terms—associates a kind of moral superiority with wealth and the opposite with lack of wealth. What this translates to in terms of attitudes is that money is not seen as something separate that you "have" which you earn, lose, accumulate, and so on in a matter-of-fact way, distinct from your worth as a person, but something that defines who you are. It makes you more or less of a person, if you get what I mean. It makes sense then that growing up in such a society, particularly considering we lived in a very affluent neighbourhood embodying this supremely superior attitude, I came to see my own financial condition as a matter to be kept private, even hidden. After many years of leaving those conditions behind, they were as if they had never been. One was legitimately restored to good society so to speak. Become a person again in all senses of the term.

It is only after living away from India for a significant bit of time and being exposed to completely different cultural ideas about money or the lack of it... that I have started re-examining my own past and present relationship to it. It's a bit like a fog lifting—I can see more clearly now, I can talk more freely now. Strangely, now that I feel like I can talk more freely about it, without losing any claim to personhood, the past has become even more present. I see its hand pretty much everywhere... and that's why I guess it comes up all the time...