Most people drink slowly and read quickly. I am the opposite. I savour the writing and gulp the toddy. As the saying goes, it’s all a matter of taste. And, of course, the two should be done independently, preferably drink in the afternoon and read at night. What else is old age and retirement for? Reading and drinking, however, come with attendant risks. Both make you mellow and thoughtful and sometimes I envy the contentment of people who do neither. They are in a majority and worth emulating for that reason alone. If I may change the old biblical saying, neither a reader nor a drinker be. The thing is both activities are hugely addictive. You start down the path and unless you are very strong willed, your financial goose is cooked. You have to have your whiskey and you have to have your books. I have done a full analysis of the comparative costs because money being limited even at the best of times, but especially after retirement, you have to allocate your resources efficiently. And believe me, as any chairman of the now dead Planning Commission will tell you, there’s nothing harder than efficient allocation. This is because what’s efficient today need not be efficient tomorrow. You may have three large drinks today, read one chapter, and feel satisfied. But tomorrow you may need the opposite. So how many bottles of whiskey and how many books should you buy on the first of each month? Economics calls this a dynamic optimisation problem with no single solution.
I was not confronted with it when I started working 53 years ago. Being employed in a publishing company, books were plentiful and nearly, or fully, free. So in a way the whiskey came for free, too, because I could buy five bottles on the first of the month — three for me and two for the inevitable guests who took advantage of the fact that there was no wife to guard the premises.
As you might have guessed, it wasn’t just books and booze. There was the cost of cigarettes, too. I used to buy two cartons on the first of the month. I needed 300 cigarettes a month. And although physicists and mathematicians insist that a three variable system is inherently unstable, I managed to stabilise it. It was as nearly a perfect solution as any mathematician would ever find. The trick was to make books, which were far cheaper, the variable cost while fixing the other two. For fifty rupees I could get a dozen books plus another dozen free because the company had written them down and off the stocks.
But all good things must end and 45 years ago I became a journalist at a much lower salary. I also acquired a wife. Income down, expenses up. You can imagine how tough the allocation problem became now. It wasn’t just the inter se distribution between booze and books but also another much bigger one: efficiency, which was now defined by my wife. Eventually we arrived at a compromise. She would not read, or read very little, but would decide how many bottles to buy. In the interest of fairness, and after much haggling, it became two of each. Cheating was permitted for me via quarter bottles and for her via magazines. She said magazines weren’t books and I said quarters were like Coca Cola. She said you can read my magazines and I said you can share my quarters. You get the point? It was like the trade deals between countries. In a strange way we both benefitted. I bought more quarters which helped cash flow, enabling her to read more magazines.