Diwali holidays were round the corner and I had set my eyes on the new bike design that had launched recently. Well that was not my first choice. What I really wanted was the mach-1 racing cycle. It looked so cool! But I was also not sure how it would feel to cycle bending down all the time, with the school sack on my back. So I had settled for the new mountain terrain bike.
I was all excited and dreaming of hopping on to the bike and racing across the neighborhood. But that was all shattered the moment I found out that it was a tad more expensive than the stipulated budget for my bike. This meant not getting the bike for Diwali. I was sure I didn’t want the bulky traditional bike. My low enthusiasm for buying a bike was evident soon and mother pried out the reason for the long face soon.
So there it was. A fixed budget and a fixed choice. No bike this Diwali!
Then one day during the vacation, when I was sitting in the house listening to the kids whizzing around on their bikes, my mother sat me down.
“I have an idea. You are a 100 bucks short of what we need for the bike you want. You can sulk and hope that someone will give, or you can earn your way out of it. I can help you do that. But you too need to work for it and take your first step toward independence.”
I could picture myself on the bike again. So I bent a bit forward and asked her what she had in mind. Now, we had multiple fete or fairs organized between Diwali and the New Year celebration in our city: In our and adjoining neighborhoods, by the school, and some other organizations. Her idea was to get into these and put up a stall and see where it goes from there.
This would be, as I look back, my first lesson in calculating input cost and the profit margin – necessary, if I wanted to have that bike before the year end. Pretty excited about getting the bike I wanted, I was all prepared to do what it took.
Now nothing happened in our house without involving everyone – it is pretty democratic in that way. So we all sat down and began identifying the fete that we would be able to participate in. Next came the food. It had to be least effort, most popular, and with least investment – and the all favorite Vada or fried potato dumplings won hands down.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rg8mH2I4VBM
Well, although most of the work was done by my family members, the experience was exciting and added to the value of the bike. We participated in 3 different fairs and I was able to almost meet the target amount. This experiment taught me many things, but it also taught me to figure out ways to fulfill our needs by being independent, with help from others.