{"id":272,"date":"2007-02-06T23:44:59","date_gmt":"2007-02-06T18:14:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wokay.in\/2007\/02\/06\/saving-face-and-saving-money\/"},"modified":"2007-02-06T23:44:59","modified_gmt":"2007-02-06T18:14:59","slug":"saving-face-and-saving-money","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/2007\/02\/06\/saving-face-and-saving-money\/","title":{"rendered":"Saving Face and Saving Money"},"content":{"rendered":"

Back to dowry. As I mentioned in this post<\/a>, fifteen megarupees is now considered too low a price for the privilege of getting your daughter married to someone she’s never met. However, there’s evidently no shortage of people willing to cough up the market clearing price.<\/p>\n

If you parked twenty megarupees in a fixed deposit, you’d get more than one and a half megarupees a year at current interest rates. But societal taboos and social standing seem to be valued much higher. If you pay some wanker to take your daughter off your hands, you lose money. But if you don’t, you lose face. As a collective society, we seem to put too much of a premium on face.<\/p>\n

But I think it’s a waning trend. Here’s why:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Remember the Nisha Sharma case<\/a>? A few people had made disapproving noises about how she hadn’t walked out because the groom had asked for dowry, but because the groom had asked for too much dowry- ‘unreasonable demands’. They disapproved because they thought that any demand more than zero is unreasonable.
    \nBut I think it’s fantastic. It shows that even if you are indoctrinated to put a value on societal pressures, you don’t put an infinite value on them.1<\/sup> There is a point at which you’d rather have the money than the respect. And if grooms demand more than that, you’ll tell them to go stick their heads in a pig.<\/li>\n
  2. Respect faces competition these days. In the bad old days, when all you could buy with your money was a Premier Padmini and a badly constructed house, the respect of your societal peers is valuable in comparison. Today, though, your money can buy much more. If gaining respect means losing out on a premium flat in Gurgaon, or a foreign education for your other children, or a vacation abroad, you’ll think twice about rushing to buy respect.<\/li>\n
  3. The economic rationale is disappearing. If your daughter is supporting you instead of you supporting your daughter, paying somebody else to take her off your hands is a pretty stupid idea.2<\/sup><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    So I’m optimistic. Not optimistic enough to think that dowry will vanish in the next twenty years, but enough to say that it’s on a downtrend.<\/p>\n

    By the way, the series isn’t over yet. Do stick around.<\/p>\n

    1<\/sup> I realise that generalising from a sample of one is not sensible. Let’s say that the Nisha Sharma case refutes the assertion that social customs are completely immune to monetary incentives.
    \n2<\/sup> This point seems to contradict the rest of the post by assuming that marriage and dowry demands are driven by economics rather than cultural inertia. My personal, unverified hypothesis is that dowry had an economic rationale to begin with, acquired the cultural overtones later, and is now driven purely by tradition. However, even if culture forces parents to marry their girl off, economic reality will encourage them to at least push the age of marriage forward.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Back to dowry. As I mentioned in this post, fifteen megarupees is now considered too low a price for the privilege of getting your daughter married to someone she’s never met. However, there’s evidently no shortage of people willing to cough up the market clearing price. If you parked twenty megarupees in a fixed deposit, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[8,59,40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business-and-economics","category-dowry","category-society"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7AOU2-4o","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=272"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}