I had an awesome meeting today with a consultancy, hired by a luxury builder.
Their agenda is to meet people who are planning to buy an apartment in South Mumbai.
Nice people. Nice Questions.
.. Not that they did the talking or asking. I did most of it :-()
Towards the end of any meeting, I always get most inspired.
This was the highlight of the short talk:
The sweet lady I met asked me, “Alok, what is Luxury to you?”
I said without thinking, “People are my luxury. I want to be with divine people.”
She had learnt in the course of the meeting that I am heavily into spirituality.
She said, “That apart, what else?”
I said, “To be an elevator alone. I think trips in an elevator without anyone inside is my biggest luxury.”
She said, “Cars?”
I said, “Cars are Vanity, not Luxury…”
She said, “What else?”
I said, “Luxury is all the stuff that money can’t buy…”
She smiled…
****
Question – WHAT is your sense of Luxury?
Please reply as a comment…!
*****
Sheth Raxit
For most of the people,
“luxury is what everyone else around me don’t have. For which i can take proud”
In old days, Radio was luxury, then car, then trip to abroad.
Or visiting Pub every weekend, or visiting Taj every weekend, or having my own private jet 🙂
Gurpreet Singh Tikku
Luxury Starts where Necessity Ends!!
Neeraj B Bhai
Luxury to me is many of those things that I ran after when I didn’t really need them.
My life changed significantly four years back – when I got out of corporate life and started serving at a place in a rural area.
Today Luxury is something that will give me a strong guilt feeling if I go for it – e.g. a dinner which costs 1500 bucks per head when I KNOW that it is one month’s salary of a security guard who puts in 12 hours a day, a 25,000 rupee mobile that will pay for 4 children’s one year education.
Alok, thank you for this post of yours – it made me think my priorities in life. You rightly differentiated in your post between Luxury and Vanity. The lady who came you possibly was marketing vanity.
– Neeraj
Ramanuj Mukherjee
My luxury is that I can pursue my dreams, can give life to my ideas, and make things happen that others have not even imagined.
Sanchita Dutta
Hey Neeraj Bhai,
your words brought tears into my eyes instantly. So true!!
BTW, Luxury is meant to give you pleasure or happiness. i think you are already achieving both when you forgo that special dinner or the S3 to see 4 children getting better educated or a guard making a living for himself n his family…
Kudos to you!!
Rahul Jain
The ultimate luxury for me is freeing up my time to focus on family and creative / clearly value added pursuits.
Money CAN buy a lot of this – Living in the U.S., I am lucky to afford to not cook, clean, spend time getting essential items from stores, standing in lines to do bank, licence type work etc. Living in a location where I do not need to drive anywhere, do not have anyone sharing my side walls, views of greenery all around. That is luxury for me.
Sanchita Dutta
A Happy Happy Discussion after some hot heavy and heated discussion out here in the past few days!!!!
Luxury to me are all those things which i wish to have but cant. but once i have those, they cease to be the luxuries of life and another new set of things take thier place. Luxury is that rainbow which we all want to catch but remains away from us…
Jatin Mahindra
A life full of freedom and satisfaction in company of wise with divinity and happiness.
Abhik Prasad
Luxury = time, energy and means to do what you want to do (can be buying a BMW for your friend on a whim or helping convert an NGO’s vision into reality)
but i guess the lovely ladies who met you were trying to get insights about ‘tangible’ features which could be incorporated into real estate projects and sold as super luxury projects.
Some features which come to mind include:
Clean air externally in the environment
privacy
silence and a great view when you are on the balcony
a helipad on the roof
infinity pools on the roof( if is a multi storey apt complex)
12 feet high ceilings
Jaseem Thayal Shareef
Well said. That’s what most of the people think Luxury is.
Milan Bavishi
wow Neeraj …well thought.
the point U said is actually called ‘alternative uses of money’.
recently i faced this question: with my first crore would i buy a jaguar xj or use interest on it to sponser annual education for 250 kids?
it wasn’t too difficult to choose education.
🙂
Ashwin Roy Choudhary
Luxury – is a “STATE of MIND “ – where you FEEL most comfortable.
Ninad G Deshmukh
Luxury to me is freedom to do what I want to do and accountable to myself only!
Mohul Ghosh
Luxury, just like truth, is very relative to the current circumstances.. for me, my current luxury is time and freedom.. time to pursue my creative dreams and freedom from working for others.. Money and things which money can buy, is just a by-product of my efforts.. so, I would always consider a nice home, a nice car and a nice vacation as vanity rather than luxury!
Puneet Nirogam Aggarwal
Apart from things that money can’t buy, Luxury is also things that WHEN BOUGHT, will give you a sense of guilty.
Luxury is an INDULGING EXPERIENCE which you would not repeat everyday.
Puneet Nirogam Aggarwal
On one of the programmes on a Travel Channel on TV, Suhel Seth said “Luxury is not Grandeur, Luxury is an experience not often repeated”
Puneet Nirogam Aggarwal
Luxury is a PLUNGE that you otherwise do not take.
Puneet Nirogam Aggarwal
Well Said, brother.
Murtaza Amin
for me it will be seeing my dad feel proud of my decision of quitting engineering and starting up of my own.
for me Luxury is seeing that one tear in my mothers eye when she will say yes, son beta, you did it.
Vineet Arora
Luxury is…. a perpetual state of joyfulness.
Everything else is just varying degrees of comfort. If luxury refers to the finest things and finest feelings, then joyfulness is that state.