Welcome to Humanise Volume II, Edition I. 

Writing this note takes me back a couple of years. I’d just joined Plum, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and was a fly on the wall for a lot of conversations around who we are supposed to be as a brand, and what we stand for. Humanise featured heavily in all these conversations. 

In many ways, Humanise complemented Plum. 

As a brand, we operate in a space that needs disruption, a breath of fresh air, and a dash of empathy. We wanted to help companies craft a culture of care for their employees. And while the business (and the product) offered the literal meaning of care, we wanted to play a part in every possible definition of care. A culture of care simply didn’t mean better benefits. It meant taking hard stances. It meant going against the flow, being contrarian, and having difficult conversations. It meant holding us all to higher standards. 
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And Humanise did that for us. 

For a year, we published a new story every week. Sometimes, around policy. Sometimes, around practice. Sometimes, around lived experiences. And sometimes about everything, and also about nothing at all. This culminated in a beautiful book we still keep in our library, and we hope you do too. 

A lot has changed since then.  

As we publish the inaugural edition of Humanise Edition Two, we wanted to keep the ethos intact, but be a little more intentional about the stories we publish. We wanted to give our readers more food for thought, while working closely with our writers to craft stories that meant something to them. We wanted to hold ourselves to a higher standard. 

While the overarching theme remains, we wanted our volumes to speak volumes about subjects close to us. We wanted myriad voices around adjacent narratives, and diversity in opinion on a singular topic. Which meant our next edition had to be themed.

While themes constrain us, they also offer clarity. About what we want to say. About who we want to say it with. And about where these conversations could go. Every six weeks, we’ll publish a new volume. A fixed number of stories around a fixed theme, and what it means to the thinking worker.  

And we hope you like it. Without further ado, presenting to you the first volume of Humanise Edition Two, around Matters of Money. 

When Shreyas and I were discussing themes for Humanise, we wanted to ensure that they would remain abstract enough to bring different perspectives, but focused enough to relate to people. For example, we rejected ‘Salaries’ because it was too narrow, while also rejecting ‘Rewards’ because that could mean anything. 

Money, on the other hand, fit the bill.  

For starters, it’s a complex subject on its own. Our relationship with money could be one of scarcity, or greed, or if borrowing from the minimalist school of thought, the root of all evil. It influences our upbringing, our relationships (whether we like it or not), and our ambition. In many ways, our relationship with monetary value is a character trait in itself. 

Now throw in work. All of us work for money. Some of us work for it. For others, it’s a bonus. It’s a very vocal elephant, irrespective of which room you’re in, be it water coolers, community, or family dinners. 

And yet, there are a million different threads one could unravel. 

It’s a world of contradictions. 

Our relationship with money is forged by the time we lived in, which you will explore first hand in Rohit’s piece about how different generations of working Indians treat money. 

It’s influenced by our background. Take Sarthak’s piece, for instance, where he writes about how our privilege determines the careers we forge. Money makes our careers, as much as careers make us money.

This privilege means different things. For some people, it’s a lack of resources. For others, it’s the privilege of a stereotype. And that is exactly what Harnidh posits, in her piece about how women have been conditioned to play defence with their money, irrespective of their financial background.  

But it’s also about trade-offs as much as it is about our history. Ria’s piece explores scenarios where money isn’t the be all and end all, and why it’s okay to walk away from a bigger paycheck sometimes. Similarly, in a world obsessed with savings and nest eggs, Dravisha writes a refreshing piece on trading your bank account for experiences you’ll cherish the most. 

These are five different stories, yet interconnected. You’ll see snatches of Dravisha’s lived experiences in Harnidh’s piece, the same way you’d see Sarthak’s conversations find space in Rohit and Ria’s stories, and the same way you’d see instances of all these stories in your personal experiences.  

I don’t think you’ll find answers to the questions you might have about money in these stories. But I hope this helps you come to terms with your relationship with it. 

Open to feedback, as always. Drop me a note.