The Marketer Who Went Off Consumption

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Hindustan Times was the first newspaper to do a story on my off-consumption experiment, almost three months back. Last Sunday, Hindustan Times followed it up with another story.

I have been through many photo-shoots of late, but no photographer I have been shot by has been as inventive as Anand. It’s a mind-blowing experience to have two professional photographers shoot each other shoot you. The photograph below, taken by my new friend Kaustav, shows Anand shooting me, with Rana in the background.

The article itself, especially the headline, was a little misleading, and my mailbox is flooded with e-mails on how I’m giving away my fully-furnished house. As you know, the house is not mine to give; I’m only giving away (most of) the stuff inside the house.

I’m going through the mails, posts and comments now and I’ll post a compilation of the entries on my blog tomorrow. I don’t know yet who I’ll gift my stuff to, but I do know that it won’t be an easy decision.

Here, by the way, is the full text of the Hindustan Times story. As you can see, it touches on several topics that I haven’t yet written about — like the new woman in my life. As always, there are more than twenty posts queued up in my head that I don’t have the time to put on paper.

Home NOT for Sale

As part of his experiment with a low-consumption life, Gaurav Mishra is offering all that his home contains to one lucky recipient - for free

Riddhi Shah (riddhi.shah@hindustantimes.com)
Mumbai

Want three beds, 500 books, a huge collection of DVDs, a washing machine and a microwave for absolutely nothing? Just head over to Gaurav Mishra’s Cuffe Parade apartment today and pick it all up. It’s that simple.

On April 13, 2008, we had featured Mishra on this very page for his unique off-consumption experiment - a year-long decision to not consume anything, except that which is absolutely necessary. Since then, Mishra (an IIM graduate who works as a marketing manager for one of India’s largest automobile brands) has decided to take his experiment further - come August, he will give up his job and move to Washington DC to act as a Yahoo fellow at Georgetown University, and will continue a life of no-consumption.

But before he leaves, Mishra has decided to give away everything he owns (save for clothes and a few books) to one very lucky person. “It’s been three months since I started the experiment, and while I’ve more or less been sticking to the rules, I also realised that just not consuming was not enough. If I really wanted to get rid of my consumption-driven identity, I needed to go further. This is a step in that direction,” says the 28year-old.

How will Mishra pick that only lucky person? He’s announced the decision on his blog (www.gauravonomics.com) and asked people to write in with ‘How they plan to use his things’. “It’s open to anyone who wants my things. They just have to email me a small paragraph,” he says, during our interview at the Crossword Café. (Mishra has tweaked one of his 10 commandments since I last saw him: from barring himself completely from visiting restaurants, he can now go to one as long as he doesn’t eat or drink). He’s also grown his once-neatly cropped hair – after being unable to buy a haircut, it is now an untidy shag.

Even though starting over in another country will involve huge amounts of consumption, Mishra insists that it will also give him the opportunity to shed his old, ‘materialistic’ skin. “I will buy only what I need – a mattress, a few utensils etc. And when I move back to Mumbai after a year, I know that I will be far more circumspect in what I buy – I definitely won’t buy two bars - for alcohol - and three beds and hundreds of DVDs,” he says.

Mishra admits that seeing strangers walk away with things that he once spent hard-earned money on can be quite difficult. (All of last week, he allowed friends to each take away up to five things from his flat). “I definitely feel a twinge every time someone goes off with one of my books. Followed closely by my bar glasses. My social life over the last five years has revolved around me playing host at home, and my bar glasses are symbols of that,” he reveals.

On the flip-side though, the first three months of the experiment have opened up a host of new experiences for him. “People often do things just to cue class or taste. Since I’ve been off consumption, that need has simply disappeared,” he says. And continues, “I was also initially worried about how my love life will cope, but I’m in a new relationship right now, and the experiment has been an enabler instead of a hindrance. We end up talking a lot more,” says Mishra.

THE STORY SO FAR

Three months ago, Gaurav Mishra decided to embark on an experiment in which he would not consume anything (unless absolutely necessary) for an entire year. The self-imposed Ten Commandments of his experiment included rules like:
No mass media allowed
No house-help allowed
Paid entertainment not allowed.