A banter for investment!

Raju Korti
For someone who is perennially short of money and keeps digging deep in his pockets to fish out greens in the fond hope of finding a few, I am amused no ends when I get inundated by unsolicited calls asking me if I have any investment plans to make.
On an average I receive at least three to four calls every day from investment firms, insurance companies and sundry banks asking to know if I wanted to invest my hard(ly)-earned money in their grandiose schemes that send me into a tizzy thinking of the lakhs I would have made upon their maturity.
Of course, initially the calls would infuriate when a man or a woman at the other end would be condescendingly polite and address me formally by first name or the surname with an honourable "Sir" as a prefix. Far from being pleased with this needless Knighthood, I would dismiss them brusquely and grope for my poor vocabulary of expletives after hanging up on them.
They all spoke with a familiarity that made me wonder if I was their long-lost friend. Their cultivated accents, put-on earnestness and pushy manners bounced off me. All that persuasive marketing would be reduced to a defensive bluster once I confronted them with an uncomfortable "From where did you get or who gave you my number?" The call that began on a benign note a Bishop would have envied, would end abruptly and me gloating over the discomfiture of the voice at the other end.
The callers, however, invariably succeeded in making me take a stock of my ever dwindling finances. A quick look at my bank balance would show that I had just about enough to scrape me through with an occasional and modest indulgence. In other words, I didn't have a hope in hell of investing if you also knew that I didn't have a job that could pay me a decent, regular income. I understood what it meant to lead a hand-to-mouth existence especially when the hand was weak enough to feed a big mouth -- literally, of course. The question of returns did not arise when there was no investment in the first place.
I have absolutely no clue what made these companies call me up -- unless they were dialling people randomly -- since (hopefully) they had no means to know about my financial health. It began to dawn upon me that it was precisely for this reason that these pesky calls started sounding more appealing to my cash-starved senses. Two reasons over-rode my feeling of anger and desperation. One, the vicarious pleasure of being thought of as a potential investor when I was anything but that and two, the more frivolous element of having some lighter moments at the expense of a searching and insistent caller.
There were times when callers sounded clairvoyant with their tempting bait: "Sir do you need a personal loan?" and I had to fend hard to save my fledgling sanity to seek one given that the calls sounded godsend at the time.  
Later, when any such call came, I would summon all my intrepidity acquired from years of experience in the Media and tell them that "I did have some investment plans and that I would get back to them soon." The decorous "Thank You" that followed told me that neither of us had fooled each other. On other occasions, I would engage the callers in academic questions that took the conversation actually to nowhere. At the end of it, anywhichways, I remained as un-invested as before and with no hope of being any better in future.
Perhaps my best was a few years back when I collected lots of credit cards that were on free offer. The curious, strange looks that people around threw at me when I opened my card-heavy wallet to shell out coins to pay for a cutting chai, brought cheers to me. I wondered how many had caught on to the fact that here was a man who had no credit at all and was incapable of attracting any either. For that matter, if anyone could have even imagined that most of those credit cards had run out of their expiry dates. I wallowed in the feeling that I could make the mare go without any substantial savings.
Money isn't everything in life and yet, money talks. And how!.
"He that cannot pay, let him pray" goes a saying. I cannot pay but I do pray that one day I shall go laughing all the way to the bank while investments bring in handsome returns.
Are the pesky callers listening?