LifePedia | Anand Sharma
Charity begins at home!
An ancient gender-neutral proverb with metaphorical and literal meaning yet some of the married women have made it a habit to tweak this a little by rewording it to ‘Charity begins from home’!
And to earn their share of brownie points and good karma, they have made it a habit to donate but donate only their husbands’ items- from his unfashionable clothes to his childhood cricket gear and sometimes even those torn and tattered blue denims that are probably more memorable than their regrettable marriages.
One of my former colleagues and now dear friend Sailesh Sharma, was instantly drawn to Sharmin for, besides other reasons her magnanimous nature evident in how she always led Charity/Donation camps in the locality and later at the corporate level. Sailesh imagined she would be an ideal bahu for his mother- “the sharing and caring” types.
However, a few years after Sailesh upgraded girlfriend Sharmin to wife status, things got a little tight. Sharmin kept donating things to the NGOs, the flood- affected people, the drought-hit villagers, the hungry protesters at India Gate and to almost every needy soul except the Ambanis.
But soon Sailesh discovered, much to his dismay that all the donated items were his and his only as her magnanimity created a hole in his pocket and an imbalance in their relationship.
From the sweat-shirts and leather jackets (of his Delhi days) now declared space-consuming and useless in coastal Bombay, to his collection of outdated techno-gadgets as well as his ancient Nike Air sneakers that supposedly reflected badly on their socio-economic status.
Everything was gone.
When finally he snapped out of the honeymoon-reverie and confronted her, pat came the logical reply- “my darling deserves a new wardrobe, new shoes and new everything”, but without ever mentioning what was wrong with the old.
Even three rows of precious old books were donated to the school library suggesting he switch to a cool Kindle.
While Sharmin’s generosity is yet to decline Sailesh’s collection of material wealth has shrunk drastically and almost inversely proportional to his loss is his wife’s burgeoning nick-knacks that have mysteriously appeared on those book racks; apparently some of it from her unused endless trousseau while the others were bought during SALE – items they can’t use bought at a price she couldn’t resist!
Have you ever heard of a man donating his wife’s memorabilia or her old clothes? It’s practically unheard of, since every item including the ones articulately labelled ‘hideous’ would also have a ‘backend’ story and therefore, inevitably for keeps.
Some items would be gifts from friends when they were all ‘young girls’. Well last I checked even 45-year-old women address each other as ‘girls’ implicitly implying that those items are still new and should obviously never find their way to the donation box just as surely as these girls will never find their way to Middle age!
Then there are the other ‘Never To Donate’ items which their mother/sisters/BFF’s would have gifted them and so enjoy total immunity based on their emotional quotient.
Ironically, these rules seldom apply to men. I am beginning to feel as if I and my fellow male comrades, were either orphans or unwanted children whose mothers` gifts (the old hand-woven yellow sweater or the Tintin comics) had no emotional value and were therefore rushed to flood-affected kids in Bangladesh.
However, when these women do donate, it’s mostly those precious gifts that we supposedly fashion-illiterate men chose for them in the good old days of our blindness aka Love.
Whether these women are actually generous-at-heart or only at the cost of their princes turned paupers can be quietly gauged by witnessing their boorish haggling at the flea markets or with the poor auto-wallahs, naturally without munimji aka husband’s resources.
Anand Sharma, is a Media professional from the Indian TV industry specialising in Content creation in his parallel roles of Creative Head/Director, and Writer (for TV production houses). He has also written a ten-episode audio-book (for Storytel) titled – “Tinderella in Jyotishland” . He is based in Bombay.