Our family started buying eggs for the first time when I was 12 years old. It made me feel guilty, as if we were doing something illegal. Up to then we just got what we wanted from the storeroom of our farm-often feeling for the eggs that were still chicken-warm.
When my mother needed anything as she was cooking - chillies, curry leaves, tomatoes - she'd shout to us to go out and pick some. On hot days my brother and I would spend hours in or under trees, picking fruit as we needed.
Depending on the season, we had a choice of mangoes, guavas, black plums, sapodillas, Barbados cherries, jackfruit, papayas, and even green lemons with salt and chilli powder.
Sometimes we'd steal grapes from the neighbours. When we got thirsty we'd drink straight from the gushing irrigation water, or beg Annaiappa to climb a tree and bring us coconuts. It was an idyll, and our parents fought to keep that way.
Dream
Today, as my wife and I plan where we'll raise a family, we're able to see what drove my parents to leave England and settle on a small farm outside Bangalore. We long had a dream of buying a plot in Coorg (my wife's beautiful native land) and getting away from the Bangalore rat race.
My wife, always the realist, was content with a big garden. I, always the hallucinator, talked about a farm where we'd grow or raise everything we needed, and even make our own soap, cheese and electricity.
Then we discovered that everybody has a similar idea, and therefore, land prices in Coorg have shot up. And, as our more practical friends never fail to remind us, what about healthcare, schooling and entertainment?
The death of the dream has made us understand the essence of it, and perhaps apply it more realistically. We realised that at its heart, it was a yearning for simplicity.
We don't want to live in a world where the line "I haven't had a weekend in months!" is a boast. We don't want to go to malls and come out loaded with bags of shopping.
Nor do we want to be among people who constantly hint at how much money they make. We're from a time and place where piles (of money) was like the affliction of the same name: something you don't mention in company.
But living simply doesn't have to be about raising goats and planting bamboo. A more realistic simplicity can be achieved by identifying the non-essential and the essential and spending as little as possible on the former, and as much as you can afford on the latter.
For example, if you need to juice oranges one day, and know you will almost never do it again, buy the horrid $1 juicer and not the $20 one.
It's easier on the conscience to have $1 lying barely used in a cupboard. But if you juice oranges every morning, don't buy the $20 one, buy the $100 one. It'll last forever, so you'll use fewer resources in your lifetime, and will always be a joy to operate.
Peer pressure
The trick, though, is the sorting process. Peer pressure and marketing can make you believe that the gyroscopic MP3 movie phone is something you can't live without. What works for me, when temptation strikes, is to go back to those days of sitting in trees.
What did you do when you didn't get the toy you dreamed about? You picked up a stick, drew lines in the mud and made do, joyfully, with what you had. Pretty soon, you forgot you ever wanted it.
Gautam Raja is a journalist based in the US.
