Cheapskate

Before I left home, my friend and longtime Ashtanga yoga teacher, David Garrigues, cautioned me that India would turn me into a cheapskate.

I was crowing about how inexpensive my monthly rent was going to be: “7000 rupees a month! That’s like 160 bucks! My taxi to the airport in Seattle is almost that much,” (I exaggerated a little.)

“Just you wait,” he said, “by the end of the first month, you’ll be trying to get them down to 6800 or so.”

I scoffed at the idea of wrangling over 200 rupees, something less than five bucks.

But I’ll be damned if he wasn’t right, at least in theory.

I haven’t gone into re-negotiations with my landlady, but I have, oddly enough, become hyper-aware of thriftiness; I would gladly wrangle over 200 rupees; I find myself occasionally making a big deal over a tenth that amount, say when the autorickshaw driver wants to charge me 100 rupees for a ride downtown that usually only costs 70 or 80.

It just goes to show how artificial monetary value is and how what we’re really valuing is something else altogether: self-esteem, maybe, or perhaps a sense of autonomy or control.

One vacillates constantly between wanting to be generous and desiring not to feel like a sucker. If the autorickshaw driver, for instance, quotes me the market rate of seventy rupees for the trip downtown, I’m perfectly happy tipping him thirty, in part for treating me fair and square; but if he tries to take advantage of me, by, for example, by asking for 100 straight off, then I’ll be loath to give him any more, and might not even ride with him in the first place.

Weird.

I wouldn’t be surprised if economists have a name for it; Malcom Gladwell has probably written an essay about it.

All I know is that it’s going to be really weird paying something like 135 rupees for a cup of coffee when I’m back in Seattle; here, that’s a meal in a restaurant for two or three; a cuppa joe is less than a 10th of that.