The Art of Payment Reminders aka Bhai Pls Mere Paise de Do

There are many advantages of being a freelance artist. It is a beautiful experience that I genuinely believe everyone should experience once in life. You feel like your own master. You wake up when you want to, although that is usually post the first taunt by parents. You sleep when you want to, albeit that’s once your girlfriend has decided the nightly telephonic conversation has been long enough. You work when you want, that is, depending on the whims of the client you’re working for. But you get the gist, it is an enjoyable experience.

At times you feel like a celebrity, with a lot of messages of appreciation and friend requests coming your way.  When I say ‘a lot’ of friend requests and messages, I mean by guy standards, which is still equivalent to probably one-fifth of how much a regular girl gets. It’s hilarious if you think of it. You could call me a recognisable comedian in the Indian circuit, who has performed all over the country to thousands of audience members with numerous corporate and public shows under his belt, and still I get as much internet attention (messages and friend requests) as an 18-yr old girl who’s just, eh, a girl. She doesn't need to be a girl with any particular achievement or distinction unless you count a pout on display picture as one. All she needs to be is just a girl. Internet as a playing field seems to be as much favourable towards the fairer sex (if that’s still an allowable reference, you never know these days) as the real world is the complete opposite of that.

Anyway, the point is that I quite like my life as a freelance artist. Mostly, that is. One of the not-so-enjoyable experiences of working as a freelance artist has to be, and I cannot assert this enough, payment issues. This seems to be a genuine issue with our entire country itself, that of delaying or stopping payments. Now I’m not sure if this issue is faced as much in other countries as well, since most of my life-experience has been limited to our sweet nation. But being a middle-class guy who’s heard about various Indian problems all his life that ‘pata hai, foreign mei aisa kuch nahi hota’, (be it traffic-issues, slow government functioning or lack of early-age sex) I would like to believe that even this issue is way more severe in our blessed country.

Delaying or stopping payments just comes very naturally to our country. And probably our conditioning about this has happened without even realising it. Let’s recall all the times vendors, such as the ‘kudawala’, ‘newspaperwala’, have come over to our place to collect their monthly dues. For some odd reason, ‘Bhaiya kal lei lena’ was our parents’ spontaneous response in all such cases. I don’t even know why most Indian parents do this? It’s not like in the one or two days that they delay the payment, they would invest it in some awesome shares and make millions of it. Why delay this menial payment for a day? Maybe it was just that the kudawaala did not look desperate enough. Maybe the need just didn't seem visible on his face on the first day itself. I’m pretty sure if every house in a society pays the kudawala his monthly dues on the very day he asks, he would probably break down in tears or start pinching himself to check if he’s not dreaming.

Jokes aside, if I get a tenner for every time I have had to remind, re-remind, re-re-remind, drop a message, call from other numbers to remind (the ‘re’ versions of these as well) a client for pending payment, I really think I could give the Ambanis a competition. (ok, thoda zyada ho gaya but again, you get the gist). And not just I, pretty much every one of my friends in the comedy industry, if not from the entire freelance artist world, have such similar tales of horror. From something wrong with the system, to boss is not present to sign the cheques, to courier got lost, I have heard it all. Sometimes I feel like writing a ScoopWhoop kind of article, ‘15 reasons they would give to delay your well-deserved payment’.

Before this starts becoming a rant, I would just like to end with a sincere request to all the readers of this meaningless blog. If you ever see anyone; be it parents, friends, boss, co-workers or just acquaintance, stopping or unnecessarily delaying anybody’s payment without any adequate reason, please take a stand and try to prevent it from happening. Somehow try to drill logic in that person in making them understand what they are doing is wrong. Or just embarrass them. Just do something. The base of service industry is in this sincerity, that on the basis of pre-agreed terms, payment would and should be made on time. For a service provider, a payment is almost like Justice. If it is delayed, somehow the value attached to it just does not stay the same.