Spice of Life | Small freebies that bring you big joy

Well, it’s not that the golfer couldn’t afford more tees, some people are known to love and preserve small things, which they find difficult to part with.

“Hey! Wait! There’s a cart coming on the fairway,” screamed my golfer buddy when I was about to hit my driver shot. The cart approached us and a golfer, very apologetically, asked us about his tee, that he forgot to collect. He even alighted from his cart and began looking for it. “It’s a turquoise one,” he informed and kept looking around but with no luck.

Avarice in human beings does ask for more and more, but the real thrill of acquisition, or possessing something as add-on, or gratis, catapults one’s gratification higher by a few notches. (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

As he left, we giggled at the idea that he had driven his cart all the way back just for a tee.

Well, it’s not that the golfer couldn’t afford more tees, some people are known to love and preserve small things, which they find difficult to part with.

We came across another golfer the other day who abandoned the hole because he wasn’t able to locate his ball in the rough. Insufferable loss for him!

Khushwant Singh honestly confessed that he attended press conferences to collect ballpoint pens offered for free to journalists. Once he even confessed his joy at not having to pay the toll tax while travelling to Kasauli as he, being a guest of a governor of a state, was being escorted by police cars.

Avarice in human beings does ask for more and more, but the real thrill of acquisition, or possessing something as add-on, or gratis, catapults one’s gratification higher by a few notches. During winters, when you go to buy peanuts warmed in earthen pots, and help yourself with two or three while ordering the stuff, the amount of pleasure you get is rewarding in itself. During visits to wineries, its small amounts of wine served in tiny goblets that taste heavenly. So do the tiny bites, offered by sweet-meat shop keepers, for taste.

But time and place sometimes determine the value of things. That which we think is costly may go abegging, and that which we think is cheap may be priced high. For certain things, cost may not be as important but possession is.

Once while shopping for household stuff in a store in Seattle, my wife told me to get coriander, euphemistically referred to as dhaniya in our local parlance, more to attribute to it its low-priced status, as the phrase in the vernacular goes.

We went to the vegetable isle and found three varieties of coriander priced between five to ten dollars, for a bunch of ten sticks. The side stack of even green chilly was at a slightly higher price. “Oh my God! Aren’t dhaniya-mirch given gratis with vegetables back in India?” I said, only to see my wife laughing at my observation, confirming that even in India, these cost at par with other vegetables now.

Such things may not cost much, but they are valued enough. Hotels these days proclaim in their brochures, offers of a welcome drink, which is only a glassful of coconut water, generally. And we love to be lured into the proclamation of the blurb,” Complimentary welcome drink.” Till recently, restaurants did not charge anything for our papad in foreign lands, which reverentially got its English appellation ‘pappadums. Well, the lure of “Buy one, get one free”, complimentary items, or goody-bags, does not leave us but with desire to possess more and more.

The Panchkula-based author is a retired IPS officer and an advocate and can be reached at rajbirdeswal@hotmail.com