Hard earned money

Stories from childhood are fun. I enjoy listening to them and they remind me of the stupid but innocent person that I used to be.

There is one that is a favourite of my Uncle K, who has been my father's business partner for as long as I have been alive. He told it to me 7 years ago when I earned the first stipend of my life. It is a funny one and reminds me how dumb I was. But it makes me smile because it's really cute. It just shows how much I valued hard-earned money since my childhood. The sarcasm in this sentence will become evident after I tell the story. Here goes:

I was 6 or 7 years old. We had our school fete coming up. It was mandatory for each student to purchase a booklet of 50 fete tickets from the school (paid for by parents' 'hard earned money' of course). It was then upto the kids to unleash the salesperson within and to go door to door to sell the tickets before the fete starts (and hence get the money back).

The enthusiastic and hard working kid that I was, did not waste a single day. I spent the whole afternoon in the scorching summer heat disturbing each and every resident of the locality to sell my tickets. I finished all the tickets by evening. I believe it would have been hard for people to say no to a small kid working so hard ;-p. Anyway so by evening I was loaded with cash and very proud of myself.

On my way back, I stopped at a toy vendor and spent the cash on toys and balloons and candy. I entered my home brimming with joy and pride but of course my father's reaction was not what I had expected. On being questioned, I simply explained that I had spent my own hard earned money. My father tried to explain that the hard-earned money was infact his since he bought me the ticket booklet. But my innocent little brain refused to understand how that could be. To me, it was very simple and clear: "Papa, you earned money, you spent it. I earned money, I spent it. It was my hard-earned money". The world was that simple for me and I did not understand why things should be any more complicated.

So at the age of 18, the day I earned my first stipend after slogging for a month, Uncle K asked me, "Do you now understand the meaning of your own hard-earned money?" and told me this funny incident.