People have expensive habits.
Some drink. Some smoke. Some chew tobacco. I have a more expensive vice: having coffee at cute places with great ambience, where I get some of my best ideas.
This expensive habit of mine recently led me to Blue Tokai in Kothrud.
My wife and I were sitting there, discussing life, future plans, and everything in between, when it was time to pay the bill. For one iced latte, the bill came to ₹273.
₹273 for a coffee is a lot in a country where people happily drink ₹10 chai.
Charging ₹100+ for a cappuccino or iced latte is now completely normal in Pune. Sometimes I feel like if you live in one of India’s top metro cities, you’re paying a tax on everything.
Your coffee is expensive.
You pay extra rent.
You pay for parking.
You pay for playing sports.
You pay extra for movie tickets.
You pay a premium for restaurants.
All of this would be easier to accept if I were living in a highly developed country where roads are clean, where I can walk on a footpath without worrying about a two-wheeler coming at me, where roads don’t randomly get dug up and stay that way for months, and where stepping out of town on a weekend doesn’t mean spending half your life stuck in traffic.
Here, there are lines everywhere.
Traffic everywhere.
Construction everywhere.
So does it really make sense to pay so much, directly and indirectly, just for the privilege of living in a metro city in India?
Sometimes I wish I could go back to my hometown.
Have a ₹20 samosa, sit peacefully, and not pay extra for everything.
But the reality is that there’s not much to do there. After five days, I’d probably find myself wanting to come back to Pune.
Another thing that bothers me is how often we hear that economic development equals GDP growth, and how we’re now the world’s fifth-largest economy.
But this “Top 5 economy” or “trillion-dollar economy” hasn’t really made my day-to-day life noticeably better.
Which makes me think GDP alone isn’t the right metric to judge quality of life.
So, sorry Modi ji.
As much as I appreciate a lot of the work you’ve done and the national confidence you’ve brought, I still feel we’re a long way from being a truly developed country.
The one thing that keeps me optimistic is the freedom this country still gives me. The freedom to build something, earn more, travel, invest, and create the life I want.
If that starts getting taken away through excessive control over what I do, what I watch, where I go, where I invest, or through constant moral policing, then I might genuinely start thinking about leaving.
Because who doesn’t love the freedom to live life on their own terms!