Material possessions and me....

I dont know whether it is an Indian trait or just a human trait but one is always judged by the number of material possessions one has...

ofcourse needless to say I have been caught in this whirlwind of societal auditing of material possessions..hence in every societal audit by Tom, Dick, Harry, Mary, George, etc etc I have always come out really at the bottom of the pile... the main question asked is "Why dont you have a car yet? Ofcourse the fact that I dont know how to drive or the fact that driving 2 hours everyday in heavy traffic is extremely uneconomical when you have a train system that takes you to your destination in 20 minutes is not at all a major consideration at all for these kind souls. Other questions include "why dont you have a house?" "Why dont you have an I-Pod?" "why dont you have a Mont Blanc pen?" etc etc etc....

My standard reaction to all this is to play the latest hindi number in my head while such conversations take place....extremely effective especially since there is a smile affixed on your face throughout ..lulling them into believing that you agree with them...

In my view material possessions are easily available and can be acquired by everyone including Dawood Ibrahim, Abu Salem, Bin Laden and George Bush....and I am sure everyone agrees that they are not exactly the epitomes of virtue in society....it is character that one cannot acquire easily ....it is character that one will have even when the material possessions go away....

Ofcourse not that I am totally oblivious to the sweep of commercialisation or vanity.... my favourite possession is a bottle of Chanel's Chance perfume...which I bought very enthusiastically when I was a student in London...infact I was so possessive about it that I did not use it for one year at all for fear of it getting over fast....till I realised that evaporation was a factor that I did not consider ...... So now I liberally use it on every occassion..even when I visit my sister... and when my friend sniffed my pefume and asked "Rexona soap?" I almost hit the roof and screamed at my friend= "this is Chanel and it cost me more than 100 pounds!" .....

Well there you go ... I am normal as hell...and I love the little material possessions I have ....even though in my friend's view Rexona soap would do exactly the same thing for me as my expensive Chanel perfume I would still swear by the latter...so much for me being oblivious to material possessions...