PIGS - Millionaires on loan

Thinking I have gone nuts eh? Not yet! Lemme explain it to you, who PIGS are and how are they classified as millionaires. Let me also tell you how I got this idea. It was sometime August 2005, just after our exams n projects here in the UK. My friend, who is pretty witty, pointed out that we (all of our Indian gang members at the university in the UK) are all millionaires. We’ve all paid £10000 as tuition fees and loads more for our staying in this western country. Though minimal lifestyle expenditure, it is considered to be expensive, more expensive if you convert the currency, which is always the case when one goes to any other country (be it appreciating or depreciating). £2000-£3000 more to live here! This makes the total cost of £12K-13K!

12-13 grand is approximately equivalent to INR1000000. Know what? It is a million! (I know we don’t follow that system) We couldn’t believe we all had spent INR 1m living here in the UK for a year. So we all were millionaires! More than 20 millionaires in one room! How exciting it could be! Posh eh? Then our discussion went on how we managed the 1m. It was unveiled that 1m has been courtesy of either SBI (State Bank of India), Canara Bank, Bank of India or some other bank. Only a few said the courtesy was his father’s bank account. Well that was it on that day!

Now I think... now we all have become PIGS -Poor Indian Graduate Students (a slang abbreviation coined by the Indian graduate students in the US), we still remain millionaires and we still remain millionaires on loan.