Go to the grocery store and pick up any one of your regular purchase items – the essentials – and you are bound to let out a little shriek and complain to your spouse, or whoever happens to be nearest to you at that moment about the sharp rise in prices.

By the end of the little shopping trip you have spent nearly twice as much as you used to for your grocery just a few years ago. The fancy word for increasing bills and prices is inflation. There is no denying that the times are tough with those earning high six figure salaries wondering where the money is going – so you might as well forget the little guy who works hard at making a pittance.

The poor have got poorer and those who thought that they were well off a few years ago are busy reassessing their value – something to do with fitting into the elite. At the same time there are those who can still afford the latest model of Merc and Beamer and run them on petrol (nothing else will do) which is overpriced or priced at over Rs80 per litre. But then I guess if you can buy a brand new Merc, then Rs80 per litre probably doesn’t even compute.

And while the Merc is being filled up at the petrol station, others sit in their little cars and recount the time when you could fill a tank in Rs200 and when petrol was a meagre seven rupees per litre – the scary thing is that I can still remember those good times.

For now let us concentrate on those of us who are in our 30s and still think that they can make a difference. Not sure whether we can make a difference, but we sure as heck do complain about everything. It doesn’t matter if it is politicians, religious scholars, relatives, co-workers, the roads, traffic, or the economy – you name it and we will find something to complain about.

Another thing that we constantly crib about, whether we admit it or not, is that there aren’t enough good restaurants in our city. Yes, yes there are enough low cost places around that sell desi food which you could buy for within Rs100 or so but hey that is not ‘quality’ and plus who wants to be seen sitting on a plastic chair by the roadside having a bun kebab (where the kebab is made from 100 per cent daal channa) or having a lassi in one of those ugly, greasy glasses with questionable cleanliness. Of course this will not do for the upwardly mobile – in actuality anything less than Rs250 a la mode will not do and that too is on the cheap side.

But hold on, aren’t we the same people, who cringe at having to pay perhaps five rupees more on a grocery item. Aren’t we the ones, who curse the economy and inflation when we go to buy fruits or vegetables? Yes, this is true, but it seems that though we might feel the pinch when we go to buy household items, when it comes to keeping up appearances there is no limit to what most of us will spend. Most of us can be seen at the swankiest of places dishing out thousands just to position ourselves in society. And this goes on at all levels of society. We love to show off and squander.

Consider that despite the high prices none of the restaurants is empty even on weeknights and most do tremendous business on weekends, this goes for your local dhabas as well – and remember that most of these places have raised their prices substantially. So what is going on? The point of the matter is that we as a nation might cry foul when the price of eggs goes up but when a popular restaurant increases the price of pudding we are willing to pay for it because as a nation we like a good lifestyle but don’t necessarily like to work hard for it, nor do we believe in simple living and high thinking.