When Did Enough Stop Being Enough?

A journey back to a time when life was simpler, yet somehow felt fuller.

When did we begin to measure wealth by the bag on someone's arm, the car they drive, or the address they live at?

It is a question that has been quietly forming in my mind, prompted, in part, by something I have noticed repeatedly. Watch young reality-show winners or influencers who have suddenly found success, particularly those whose journeys began in modest homes and smaller towns, and listen to the things that so often come to represent having “made it”: the first designer handbag, branded clothes, the luxury car, the expensive watch, the home in the right neighbourhood. There is something poignant about it. The things once associated with a more affluent life become, almost inevitably, the first visible expressions of one's own success.

I do not say this in judgement. The desire is entirely understandable. Prosperity has always found expression in the things people possess. What troubles me is something subtler: when did the symbols of wealth begin to shape our understanding of wealth itself? And this is hardly a phenomenon confined to those experiencing newfound success. If anything, it becomes more revealing when one looks at circles where affluence has long been familiar.

In sophisticated metropolitan circles, the same distinctions persist, only in subtler forms. The bag on your arm can speak before you do; the car you arrive in carries its own social currency; even where you live can confer status. South Delhi commands a certain cachet, South Bombay another, while North Delhi or East Delhi may invite an altogether different judgement.

I do not remember anyone asking what brand another woman's handbag was when I was growing up. Perhaps that is because we had not yet learnt to carry our identities on our shoulders.

And that leads me to the question beneath all the others: what, after all, is a rich life?

To answer it, I find myself travelling backwards, to a Delhi of the 1970s and 80s, to a childhood in which we possessed considerably less, yet I cannot remember ever thinking that our lives were poor.

I grew up in a middle-class Jain family, in a colony established by families uprooted during Partition. My father was a scientist at DRDO; my mother taught English in a government school. Like many service-class households of that generation, ours was built around education, stability and quiet respectability. Money was earned honestly, spent carefully and saved prudently. What one knew, how one conducted oneself and what one made of one's life mattered far more than what one owned.

We lived in a joint family. My father was one of five brothers, and my grandparents lived with us too. Each brother and his family had just one room to call their own. It is almost startling to write that today, when homes are described in square footage, en-suite bathrooms and walk-in wardrobes. Yet I do not remember feeling cramped.

Perhaps the house felt larger because life was never expected to remain inside one's allotted room. It spilled into the courtyard and across thresholds, into one another's lives. Cousins wandered in and out, food travelled between kitchens, clothes were borrowed, and quarrels and laughter moved just as freely through the house. There was little sense of my space. There was, instead, our home. We had less space to ourselves, but so many more people to belong to.

Things, too, were expected to stay. A Kelvinator refrigerator stood in our house from before I can properly remember until well after I was married myself, and nobody discussed whether it looked dated. It cooled, and that was reason enough. If the mixer faltered, somebody repaired it. If the television went blank, a mechanic arrived with his box of tools and opened its mysterious innards on the floor while we hovered nearby. Clothes were altered, handed down and retired only when they were truly worn out. We did not know that one day this would acquire an elegant name like sustainable living. Waste simply made little sense.

Perhaps because new things entered our homes less frequently, we remembered their arrival. I can still picture our first telephone. I must have been in Grade Nine or Ten when it was installed: sage green, solid, with a rotary dial that made its slow, deliberate journey back after every number.

One telephone served the entire household. Someone answered it, someone shouted your name across the house, and by the time you reached the receiver half the family usually knew who was calling. If you were out, the caller simply tried again later. There was no trail of missed calls awaiting explanation. Plans, once made, were expected to be kept.

People, too, arrived with less ceremony. An unexpected knock at the door was not automatically treated as an intrusion. Tea acquired another cup, food stretched to another plate and everyone adjusted. Looking back, that may have been one of our quietest forms of abundance: we made room, in our homes, in our days and in our lives, for people.

There is a curious paradox in that crowded existence which I only understood much later. We had far less privacy from the people we loved, yet far more privacy from the world. Telephone conversations could be overheard, cousins wandered in without knocking and somebody usually knew where you had gone. But beyond the people who actually formed our lives, we were largely unknown.

A picnic remained a picnic. A meal could be enjoyed without first being arranged for a photograph. A new sari or something my father brought home could give pleasure without requiring witnesses. Ordinary life had no audience beyond the people who were actually part of it.

We could also disappear for a while. Once you left the house, you were simply out. Someone might telephone and fail to reach you; a friend might come by and find you absent. Neither required an explanation. There was a freedom in not being perpetually reachable that we did not know was freedom then.

And we knew how to wait. For letters, for relatives arriving by train, for a favourite song on the radio, for Sunday evening television, for someone to come home. Anticipation had time to gather.

Even photographs taught us patience.

A roll of film gave us thirty-six exposures. Thirty-six photographs might have to contain a birthday, a holiday and several months of ordinary family life. Every click mattered. There was no screen to tell you whether the picture was good enough and no possibility of taking twenty more until everybody looked just right. The film went to the studio and returned days later in a paper envelope, accompanied by those brown strips of negatives we carefully preserved and occasionally held up against the light.

Some photographs were beautiful. Others were blurred. Someone had blinked, a head was cut off, a thumb had wandered into a corner.

We kept them anyway.

We did not curate memory into perfection. We accepted the photograph we had because it was the moment we had. There were no filters to improve the sky and no hundred nearly identical images from which to select the one that made our lives look happiest. The photograph did not have to prove that the moment had been beautiful. We already knew whether it had been.

Today, a child may accumulate thousands of photographs before she is old enough to remember any of them. I have comparatively few from my own childhood, yet if I close my eyes, entire rooms return: the arrangement of beds, cousins talking after the lights were out, the heat of a Delhi afternoon, my grandmother's voice, the smell of food coming from another part of the house.

Much of it was never photographed at all.

Nothing brings that world back more vividly than the summer holidays. They lasted a full two months, but the excitement began weeks before they did with one increasingly urgent question: When are we going to Nani's house?

We did not go for lunch or a carefully rationed weekend. We went for a month. Sometimes two. Cousins arrived from different homes and, within hours, became one unruly tribe. Mattresses appeared on floors, mangoes disappeared by the dozen, quarrels were forgotten by teatime. We invented games whose rules changed whenever somebody began to lose and discovered that boredom, when adults did not rush in to cure it, could become imagination.

At night, we slept on the terrace. Water was splashed across the sun-baked floor to cool it and beds laid beneath the open sky. All of us children jostled to sleep closest to our grandmother because she told the best ghost stories. We frightened ourselves thoroughly and then edged closer to one another beneath the sheets.

Some of the finest nights were those when the electricity failed, which it often did. Candles were lit, dinner became a candlelight affair long before such things acquired romantic pretensions, and eventually we drifted into the lane where other families had done exactly the same. What began as a power cut became an impromptu gathering. Today, ten minutes without the internet can make a household restless; back then, the loss of electricity could bring an entire street outside.

Days belonged largely to us. We ran from one friend's house to another, played in the street and chased stray kites as though possession of one might materially alter our fortunes. We knew the time not from a screen, but from the sun, somebody's mother calling from a balcony, and the one deadline that mattered: be home before Papa returned from office.

Rain had its own ritual. If the skies opened, my father might return carrying hot samosas, moong dal laddoos and jalebis from Apni Dukaan. Even today, the smell of rain can take me there faster than any photograph.

Our pleasures cost remarkably little and felt like a great deal. A rupee given for a school picnic made me feel rich. Twelve golgappas cost that rupee; an entire loaf of bread cost ninety-five paise. I mention the prices not to perform the familiar arithmetic of inflation, but because I remember the feeling of that coin in my hand.

It felt like possibility.

Perhaps children do not measure abundance by how much they possess, but by how much delight they can draw from what they have.

My father demonstrated this rather spectacularly on the days he managed to take not merely my brother and me but four or five cousins as well on his Bajaj scooter for an outing around Delhi. By every contemporary principle of transport, geometry and parenting, I am not entirely sure how this was achieved. In memory, however, six children simply belonged to one scooter, one father and one adventure.

Winter brought the more ceremonious family picnics: India Gate, Lodhi Garden, Nehru Park. The Bajaj carried us there; my mother carried nearly everything else, having cooked it all at home. There was a sheet for the grass, a basket filled with food, fruit, cucumbers, carrots and crisp winter radishes, badminton racquets, a cricket bat and board games. Lunch stretched through the afternoon.

There was no restaurant reservation, no curated hamper and, more importantly, no photograph being taken for the benefit of people who were not there.

The people for whom the afternoon mattered were already sitting on the sheet.

Decades later, I cannot remember what any of us wore to those picnics or whether another family had a better scooter. I remember my mother's food, my father's scooter, the winter sun.

I remember who was there.

And this, I think, is where my childhood begins to answer the question with which I started. We had fewer things with which to demonstrate that we were rich, but an astonishing number of ways to feel that we were.

Memory is a flattering editor, and the India of my childhood was hardly an idyll. Opportunities were fewer, conventions more restrictive, particularly for women, and access to knowledge depended greatly upon where one lived and what one could reach. Technology has dismantled many of those boundaries, and we are immeasurably richer for it. A phone in one's palm can now open more knowledge than all the libraries I could reach in my childhood. A student in Delhi can enter an Oxford library without crossing a continent. Families separated by oceans can see one another every evening. A woman can build a profession from her home. Artificial intelligence can place before an ordinary person, in seconds, knowledge that once required extraordinary access.

I would not exchange 2026 for 1976. But progress deserves a more demanding question than how much easier life has become. We must also ask what ease has altered in us.

The world of my childhood was smaller. We knew fewer people, saw fewer places, owned fewer things and had fewer choices. Yet because the world arrived slowly, we had time to absorb it. Today almost everything is within reach, and almost everything arrives at once. We have conquered distance, waiting and, to a remarkable extent, inconvenience. But in removing so many limits from our lives, we may also have weakened some of the conditions that taught us patience, anticipation and contentment.

More significantly, the boundaries of comparison have disappeared. As a child, I measured my life largely against people I actually knew: a cousin, a classmate, a neighbour, perhaps the occasional film star in a magazine. Today, before breakfast is over, we may already have entered hundreds of other lives: somebody's immaculate home, another person's exotic holiday, a younger face, a thinner body, a coveted handbag, a more prestigious address, a larger car. We are no longer merely living among other people. We are living amid a continuous exhibition of how other people appear to live.

Aspiration has always existed. What has changed is not our capacity to desire, but the number of things we are invited to desire and how frequently we are reminded that we do not yet possess them. When aspiration becomes this relentless, consumption can begin to masquerade as identity. We stop merely enjoying beautiful things and begin asking them to establish our taste, our success, our belonging, even our worth.

That, I think, is what the world of my childhood still has to teach me. Not that everything old was better, but that we once seemed to possess a quieter sense of proportion. Beautiful things could be desired without becoming measures of our worth, and a life could be deeply fulfilling without needing to look impressive from the outside.

I would not return to the world of the rotary telephone, the power cuts or even that indestructible Kelvinator. But there are things from that world I would carry forward… the unhurried visits, the crowded picnic sheet, the cousin who simply stayed on, the instinct to mend before replacing, and the freedom to enjoy something without wondering how it might appear to anyone else.

Most of all, I would carry with me something that world seemed to understand instinctively… the wisdom to recognise when what we have is already enough.