Thrift and thriving 1

2007 was a very important year for everyone's finances. It told us why we need to have solid financial plannings and gave us ample reasons to fall back to a policy which many of the new generation considered outdated, that is being thrifty. That year and thereafter we saw unprecedented number of bankruptciesand many people losing their jobs and with that many other things which they owned on credit. In the midst of all one thing stood pretty clear Indian banks and Indians somehow and for some reasons still thrived. People were perplexed and were asking how and why.

But the answer was simple Indians have thriftiness deeply rooted into them. Right from the big corporate banks to my father everyone believes in the phrase

“A penny saved is a penny earned” or “A bird in hand is better than two in the bush”

While many in the western world were being affected with affluenza, we on the other hand still upholded virtues like frugality. No wonder RBI has one of the stringent guidelines when it comes to operations relating to credit for the banks. We have one of the highest Cash reserve ratios and Statutory liquidity ratios. We can see it this way, being thrifty was a big reason why indian business and banks did survive and continue to do better than just surviving despite behemoths like Bank of America and Morgan Stanley feeling the pinch. But the real understanding of the concept of thrift and thriving comes when we look at average Indian and an average American. While many Americans during the subprime mortgage crises came to streets, Indians mostly survived and some managed to do well as most of them had their own homes, had savings in the bank and still had other assets like gold to fall to.

If we look closely we can find that word “thrift” is cognate to the verb “thrive”. In the view of Theodore Roosevelt malloch chairman and CEO of The Rooservelt group "Thrift if if properly understood should be joined with constellation of other characteristics that make society more just and ultimately more prosperous". Infact being thrifty does not make a person a miser, but opposite to that by not being thrift one becomes a person who wastes. Mahatma Gandhi's one of the strongest beliefs were to refrain oneself from wasting. It is for that very reason that thrift inevitably leads to thriving.