Recession Busters - Part 1

The two topics, which have been consuming unreasonable reels of newsprint & airtime on news channels off late, are Terrorism & Recession.  While terrorism could be quite a sensitive topic to blog about, recession is already sensitive. So thought of starting off a series of posts on various ways to bust the recession. Obviously in the style that suits me the most. So lets get rolling.

Hoard your Monies

While we hear stories of people getting retrenched, laid-off, kicked-off & think, lucky us to have made it through another day, I think it’s a good idea to start hoarding our monies before the pink slips make us go red in our face & elsewhere. So here are a few tips & ideas to help us hoard truckloads of money, for those dry days.

• Pick the damn phone, call your insurance company & stop investments in all your pension plans. Needless to say the pension plans are planned to get you monies after 15, 20, 25 years. But it really does not put monies in your pocket in the next 15, 20, 25 days or worst 15, 20, 25 minutes. You never know whats gonna hit you in these times, so might as well have the money lying with you rather than the insurance company

• A friend of mine at Infosys was talking about how his boss decided not to buy a car he was planning to buy & rather settle down for a bike instead. After a few days he decided to not buy the bike as well. He obviously wanted to hoard that money for unforeseen days ahead. So all of us who are already using public transport to commute, hats off to their foresight. If we could probably cycle it down to our work places or walk down, we could save on the monies spent at the health club & add it to our ‘Hoard Fund’

• Liquid is the buzzword here my friend. Stay liquid at all times no matter what. Obviously not referring to martinis or cognacs or tequila or any other form of fluid, me talking about cash baby. So go ahead sell off the piece of inherited land in your home town, withdraw the Provident Fund stuck in your previous company, liquidate the low interest paying FD you got into a few years back, sell your old car lying unused in your garage, the old camera, the old denim jacket from your college days (which does not fit you any longer), the old music cassettes and any other vintage & antique (fancy names for old & useless) stuff you think might fetch you a few bucks to add to the ‘Hoard Fund’. Ebay it man, just inacse you are feeling lost.

•  Any other money hoarding ideas that come into your mind while you read this post, are to be strictly adhered to. If you think your idea is smart enough do not hesitate to share it with your colleagues or me. Happy Hoarding. 

The Economy of Loose Cigarettes

Loose cigarettes to be bought or sold in any country other than the third world countries & obviously India is a crime. I was trying to figure out why is it a crime to sell or buy loose cigarettes? What is so wrong about it that the developed nations categorize it as a CRIME. And if it is such a crime why don't we recognize it as a crime when more than 60% of cigarettes sold in India are loose.

So Swaminomics got the better of me & I got behind this to understand the economics & logic behind this. India is probably one of the largest cigarette/bidi markets in the world. We sell over 100 billion sticks of cigarettes & 800 billion sticks of bidis annually so that makes it close to 8 billion cigarettes & 64 billion bidis in a month. Phew, that got the smoke coming from my ears. India smokes man, like nobody's business. Over 85% of excise revenues collected in India amounting to whopping 8500 crores come from the tobacco industry alone. But the insight is not in this, it is about the excise revenue which never comes to the GOI (Government of India, what did you think) 

That's exactly what the loose cigarettes add up to. Now lets take a closer look, I smoke the Gold Flake king size which for a pack of 10 costs INR 40. This has all the excise revenues & other taxes added in it. When I go to buy a loose GF I pay 4.50 INR per stick. That's 5 Rs. more per pack of 10 or 0.50 Rs. for each stick which goes absolutely unaccounted for. A quick math here will say that considering 100 billion sticks of cigarette alone ( I am not calculating loose bidis) sold every year of which close to 60% are sold loosely, the amount of excise & tax loss to the exchequer is close to a whopping 300 billion Rs. Add the bidi figures to it & you could be zapped. Phew, smoke coming out of my ears again.

So after all the math, now I realize why its a crime to sell or buy loose cigarettes in developed nations. And why they are DEVELOPED nations in the first place. And in these times of recession I hope that the GOI reduces the Income Taxes & VAT's & Service Taxes and all the burden on the common man & look at various ways to earn revenues. And loose cigarettes is definitely a good start. Declare it a CRIME Mr. Ramadoss, we are with you. Save us the burden.

Nilesh Ghai      

Plastic Aficionados

Indians are in love with plastic ( POLYETHYLENE for those of you who like the technical name). So much in love with it that you will not find anything else but plastic in any format in any corner of India that you visit. Plastic bags, plastic buckets, plastic bottles, plastic sheets, plastic on your new car seats, plastic on your new TV set, plastic on your new water bottle, thankfully our better halves don't come wrapped in plastic when we get married.

OK, just last month, Ajay from our society bought a shining new car. He met us, distributed sweets, threw a small party for his newly acquired possession. We ate, drank, couldn't stop appreciating the power, looks, bhp and the food & wine & all other sundry things that we knew about the automobiles. For a moment I thought everyone in the room knew so much about automobiles that I probably was the only person who knew so less and was hardly able to cope up with the bhp's, and the torque's and any of the auto lingo. I started feeling I was at Detroit to attend a party.

Incidentally his car park is just next to mine and I have been seeing his car for all this while. The newness is still there, it still shines and looks like a brand new car which he just bought yesterday. And the reason for that is the PLASTIC again. The car seats, handle bars, gear knob, and anything & everything inside the car is still wrapped in the plastic that was there when he bought the car. I don't think he plans to remove the plastic atleast for the next one year or little more than that. After all its a new car damn it.

I was going through a report which talks about USA being the largest consumer of plastic with per capita plastic consumption being a little more than 20 kgs. I would beg to differ here as I strongly feel that India has the largest per capita consumption of plastic in the world the only difference being that we love to preserve plastics The buckets in our house, the dustbins, the kitchen storage bins, the plastic bags and everything else in plastic has been there from the time we bought it which could be a decade or more. 

We Indians strongly believe in the adage: If it ain't broken, don't mend it. 

Hail PLASTIC !!!!!!!!!!!

Nilesh Ghai