Justification of Dowry

Two years later after completing the MBA, Sai was in his 27^th year of youthfulness and his parents had already started pestering him about marriage. His dad had registered his name in many matrimonial sites and “Pathakji” kind of match makers and mom had started to bring up proposal from the likes of neighboring “Sharmaji” and “Guptaji”. Sai was currently working with an MNC, earning a 7 figure salary – actually just touched the 7 figure mark barely, and was still confused about his life. The famous dialogue from Dabangg – “Saans kahaa se le aur P**de kahaan se” perfectly describes his situation. However down his mind, he has still kept his passion alive and was always finding a shortcut to reach it. He thought that this marriage would be the one major event – a rocket propeller, which would give a thrust to his life to reach his goal – i.e. to be rich, more quickly.

So with this view in the hindsight, he started collecting his thoughts, gearing up to be ready for marriage, and formulated a strategy to achieve his goal. He started penning down his thoughts and created a strategy formulation PPT, a thing best learnt at B-Schools. He also created a financial excel model applying all the things he learned in those idiotic financial courses he took. Now you must be wondering, what the hell is wrong with this guy? Why is creating a PPT and Excel model for marriage? The simplest answer is  for “Negotiating Dowry” with his to-be-father-in-law. Now if you think I am insane and propagating dowry in this 20^th century, in that case let me give the logic Sai had behind dowry, which I felt was fairly justified on grounds of equality. When I had asked Sai the same question his reply was fairly simple. Here are the thoughts which Sai had on dowry system.

Sai: In the world of Business Valuation, the market capitalization ( = no of shares * price  per share) of the company indicates it true worth. The market capitalization indicates the future earning potential and growth trajectory of the company. Higher the market cap more is the earning potential and more is the growth. Vice a versa is also true. So now considering that in this modern society Male and Female are equal in all respect, I believe that it is not the task of the wife to do only the household work, and the task of husband to only work outside and earn money for the family. I feel both the husband and wife should be equally qualified, work shoulder to shoulder and earn for the family. If both of them have similar career growth prospects and earning potential, then they should be considered equal. However if this is not the case, we should then calculate the future earnings of both and discount them with suitable discount rate. The PV of the estimated future earnings would give their true tangible worth (similar to market capital). This calculation is similar to the FCFE/FCFF formula used to find the market capitalization of any business. So if the tangible value (market value) of husband comes out to be more than wife’s, to-be-wife should pay the Present Value (PV) of difference upfront and vice a versa is also true, where to-be-husband would pay the PV of difference upfront to his to-be-wife. Some call it dowry, claim it to be illegal and criticize it. However I feel it is justified and fair to expect such remuneration. Finally we live in world which screams for equality, then why should wife have fun time watching TV at home and husband should be screwing up his precious life working for an errant boss to sustain the family alone. The household work can be outsourced to a maid with a nominal charge. We don’t marry to have our wife work as maids.

These was the strong response i received from Sai which gave his viewpoint on dowry system, and how to use modern financial management models to calculate dowry. 

Story continued...........(The first Marriage proposal)