Did you know how much your parents earned when you were a child?

View the original post on Musing.io

Of course I knew exactly what they used to earn while I was a child. And I'm well aware of what do they earn even now. Here is how...

My father had never been to any formal schooling and my mother dominates him in the sense that she had received an year or so of formal education in her childhood. Yet, it hadn't made any significant impact in her life as her reading and writing skills remained on par with my so called illiterate father. To put it simply, both of my parents could hardly read and it was almost impossible for them to write something even in our regional languages( Tamil and Malayalam).

By the age of 5, I had already been in 1st grade and had become the sole educated person from my entire family tree who at least had known to read and write! No wonder I was entrusted by my family with the tasks to fill up various application forms for which, hitherto, they were seeking help from others . This was happening in the year 1998 and a large portion of our country was still relying on postcards and postal letters for communication. I lost count of letters I had written in  those days!

My parents were and still are daily wage laborers who work in the cardamom plantations(generally we call those working places as cardamom estates) located in our region. They get their salaries in the end of every week. By and large, that highly expected day happens to be saturday. Since their nature of work is manual labor, there is no guarantee that they can do work for all 6 days in a week. Your body needs to be very healthy and ill-free in order to get the salary of one full week. Fortunately, my parents, who now are in their mid and late 40's, still never fail to get full salary every week.

Coming back to my role, ever since I joined the school, I got promotion from being a mere elder son to my parents to a cashier cum supervisor of my whole family. My father and mother trusted me a lot in spite of me being a mere 5 or 6 year old kid! My uniqueness was none other than the  highhhhhhh level of education that I possessed!

I knew very well about how much did my parents earn in every single day and week. They would give their salary in my hands and I used to make a record on earnings and expenditure. We would sit together and would discuss briefly about the upcoming expenditure and make plans accordingly. In case of any mismatch between their salaries and the days they worked, I would inform them about this and I still remember the instances when my father used to heavily argue with his Bose alleging him of cheating after believing my words. To my surprise my stand was right in all those world wars!

I am not remotely hesitant to reveal their salary here on this blockchain. Back then, my father and mother used to get Rs 60 and  Rs 40 ( Indian Rupees) Respectively as their daily wage. If converted into USD( 1 USD was around 40 indian rupees then), My father used to get almost 1.5 USD and my mother 1 USD for their work between 7AM to 4 PM on a day. In the course of time, salaries got increased gradually and now they get more remuneration for they work than they used to before. Now my father gets exactly Rs 600 and my mother get Rs 350 for their work a day.( In USD, they get around  $9 and $5 respectively)