Tag: pittance

Doctors marrying doctors

So I’ve learnt that doctors prefer to marry other doctors. Well, there’s nothing new in this. When I think about my extended families, and doctors there, most of them I realize are married to other doctors. The ostensible reason, I’m told, is that it’s a different lifestyle, and only doctors can understand the lifestyles of other doctors, and hence this preference. It cannot be ruled out, however, that it is a fallout of pretty good gender ratios and long hours at medical colleges, which leads to coupling – with the “understand each other’s professions” only being a fig leaf.

While people in other professions also marry within their profession (again put down to ease of “meeting”), this tendency is especially exaggerated among doctors. The problem with this, though, is that it doesn’t make financial sense.

Now, the deal with doctors is that they don’t earn good money until very late. After you’ve finished your bachelors, you first need to slog it off for a few years before you get a masters seat. And once you’ve finished your masters, you need to slog for a few years at a hospital which will pay you a pittance, until a point comes in life when you become senior enough that you start getting paid well.

Typically, most doctors (in India) don’t make much at all till they are 35, and after that they get flooded with money. Now, if two doctors marry, that means they are starved of cash flow during their prime years – time when their engineer and MBA counterparts will be minting money, traveling the world, having kids and buying houses. By the time the doctor couple makes money, they would probably be well past their youth, and it is only their descendants that will get to really enjoy their cash flows.

If a doctor marries an engineer (or an MBA), though, cash flows are better hedged. While it is true of all professions that salary goes up with years of experience, the curve isn’t as steep for professions apart from doctors. So, a doctor-MBA couple (say) can live a good life on the MBAs salary till they are in their mid-late 30s, by which time the doctor’s career would have begun to take off and the MBA would have begun to burn out. And then the doctor’s enhanced cash flow starts kicking in! Great hedge, I would say!

So dear doctors, unless you have fallen in love with a classmate at medical school (which has effectively locked you in to a lifetime of poor cash flow structures), reconsider. Consider marrying out of your profession. Yes, it might be harder for you to get each others’ professions. But at least your finances are taken care of!

PS: Some other professions such as lawyers and accountants also have a fairly steep salary increase curve – starting off at a pittance and then later making money. But in these professions people end up getting to “partner level” at around 30, which is far superior to doctors. Then again, such professionals don’t inter-marry within profession as much as doctors do.

Death Ceremonies

Considering the number of times I’ve been through the death/post-death/death-anniversary ceremonies over the last three odd years it’s quite surprising that I haven’t really blogged about it. Maybe I considered the topic to be way to personal to blog about. Maybe I was so busy fighting relatives that I didn’t have the opportunity to observe things.

So most of the time during the death ceremony was spent with me shifting my sacred thread from left to right, and back, and back. The  basic idea is that for all death-related stuff, one is supposed to wear the thread from right shoulder to left waist (it’s normally worn from left shoulder to right waist). But then, considering that it’s a religious ceremony, large portions are also spent praying, and when you are praying to the gods, you are supposed to wear the thread the right way.

And then these two kinds keep alternating, so you spend a lot of time just doing that! To aid this and to save time, the upper cloth is tied around the tummy (like an auxiliary dhoti) rather than over the shoulders. And by the end of every such ceremony, you would have figured out when you’ll have to switch the orientation of the thread.

Then during the annual death ceremonies, there are two brahmins who help in officiating. Apparently there’s something special about these brahmins. Once, a couple of years back, one of these guys failed to turn up on time because of which the entire ceremony was getting delayed, and I hinted to an uncle that since he too is a brahmin he should deputise. And then this uncle (a rather religious character) gave me a long lecture about the processes and sacrifices that these “special” brahmins (who are paid a pittance – their daily rate is about half of what an average junior skilled worker (carpenter, painter, etc) makes) have to go through to allow them to perform their duty.

Now, it is as if one of these brahmins plays god and the other plays the devil (something of the sort). The “god” is always addressed with the thread in the normal position while the “devil” is addressed with the thread from right shoulder to left waist. The “god” is worshipped with rice, while the “devil” is worshipped with black sesame seeds. It seems as if the devil is somehow supposed to represent some kind of companion of the people in the afterlife – in whose memory the ceremonies are being performed.

This time we had struck a package deal (inclusive of all ceremonies, offerings, gifts, lunch, consumables, etc.) but on earlier occasions we were plagued by the priests trying to blackmail us by demanding that we give them expensive gifts, over and above the fees that we had agreed upon. And then once, by drawing upon a clever analogy, I managed to convince one of them that the gifts that I’d given earlier were like advance payment for services and that I’d pay only the balance. Unfortunately some relatives ridiculed me for fighting with the priest and made me pay him the full amount (yeah it was my money. none of these relatives coughed up a naya paisa)

The ceremonies are in general disgusting affairs and the only way to go through them is to just go through the processes. Sometimes, thinking about what kind of a blog post to write on the process can help take your mind away from random wanderings.