#5 My First Ten Bucks

[This is largely from a blog post I had put on my website several years ago (February 2011).  I was reminded of it by two incidents that happened recently.  Read on ... ]

Ah! The joys of earning money

This evening I visited my mum, now nearing ninety, and listened, for the umpteenth time to several of her stories of yesteryear.  And, like rediscovering a good book, as one thumbs the pages, suddenly nuggets of information pop out that you hadn't noticed earlier.  She was recounting how she got a job in shorthand-and-typing back then.  It was a long and interesting story which probably deserves its own post. But the upshot of it was that she did land the job at the princely sum of Rs 70 a month.

And then, I was reminded of my son earning his first Rs 300 working as a Kayaking Instructor at EcoPark, Kolkata.  And when you're getting older, you tend to reminisce about your life and times and the first money you ever earned.

Imagine having a bicycle on which you have to pay the instalments. Not only that, the princely sum of Rs 225 had to be paid back to my dad in about a year of instalments, I recall. At the time I remember wondering why he was so harsh on me -- visions of Shylock and pounds of flesh floated by. But you ought to know that the bicycle was bought for the sole purpose of getting me around faster than my favourite method of walking. It did get me around, we went to several places, my bike and I.

So, go get the money

Coupled with the mistaken notion that I had a bright future in advertising, poster art actually, and the fact that somewhere down the line someone bought me a box of paints and brushes, I started looking for work in the fairly unknown sector of Poster Painting. Dad was a loud and large member of the Church Choir and would go religiously (no pun intended) to practices. One of the equally loud, large and religious members was Mary. Mary worked as a P.A. to a Mr Joe E D'Souza — I use the E advisedly as the Goan community was teeming with Joe D'Souzas.

One day Mary dropped in to discuss recipes with my mum and discovered I had this "flair" for painting posters. Next day I received a call from her asking me to drop in at the Dalhousie Institute to meet Mr Joe E D'Souza, a senior noise at the said club. We met and he asked me to paint a poster advertising all the club events that were scheduled for the coming month. I was to use any ideas that I could harness but I would be paid as per budget, the sum of Rs 10 (ten, for the numerically challenged or the disbelieving)! I happily cycled off to various stores to purchase the wherewithal, cleared the dining table and started work.

My nascent efforts at copying graphics off the Art van Damme record sleeves and interspersing them with colourful text, painfully copied from various "Lettering" books resulted in a night of joyous creativity. Next morning, poster carefully wrapped in dry newspaper, my bike and I headed towards the DI (nickname for you know where). With a song in my heart and a couple of daal puries under my belt I unveiled the work of art ... Mr Joe E (I had nicknamed him Joey by then, though he never knew it) looked at the poster and exclaimed, "No spelling mistakes!" as though it was my fault. He then peeled off a tenner (part of which was already spent at the daal purie shop) and passed it on to me.

Even in those salad days I was made to sign a green voucher and receive the money before my bike and I could make a quick getaway. And that's how poster painting came to take up several years of my night life through school and college and a few years later too. The DI and several other clubs had upped the fee to Rs 50 in steps over a couple of years of dedicated hard work and I even managed to employ my younger brother, Paul, to add some value.

Learning by Earning - the moral of the story

I have been told that my blog needs to have a lesson in it somewhere.  So, here's one that I latched on to several decades later when I met the ultra-creative Sumit Roy and his "mobike" driven learning concepts.  He is a firm believer in the concept, theory and practice of "Learning by Earning". All I can say in all my years of dabbling in poster painting, photography and music, I did exactly that -- earned and learned from it.  Looking back, I can only say that most of what I did was take an activity that I could fall in love with, learn while selling the skill just enough to pay for the learning and have a little left over with which to buy goodies.

My secret was three aluminum tiffin boxes in my cupboard - one was labelled "Photography", another "Posters" and a third "Music".  The earnings went into the appropriate box.  When it was decent enough, I could buy equipment related to that activity.  So guitar strings and amplifiers came from Box 3, paints, brushes and drawing boards came from Box 2, and film, lenses and eventually my Nikon F2 came from Box 1.

It requires discipline and a driving urge to learn and earn, save and spend.  Something I'm trying to teach my own kids in this age of entitlement and expensive tastes!