With today’s retail temptations available everywhere, even from the comfort of your home, it is tough to say ‘No’. To draw the line. To acknowledge, ‘I don’t need to acquire this addition to my wardrobe, I don’t need to have that pack of brownies-to-die-for when I can make a batch of them myself with a little effort ...’

Putting a lid on shopping is just what one brave woman did, the newspapers report — and she kept it up for a full year. Admirable. I’m not sure that I could be as abstemious and self-controlled for a fraction of the time.

Some years ago, keeping away from retail therapy was not difficult. We were living in a desert outpost in India, some distance from the nearest town. Other than a couple of bare-necessity shops that catered to the everyday needs of the families of the army units stationed there, there was nothing around. No book shops to browse through, no ice-cream parlours to linger in — no ice-cream, no chocolates, no juices, no instant food. There were seasonal vegetables and fruit. There was the daily newspaper — a day late, I might add. There were ‘soft drinks’ to quench our thirst if we were desperate, but they were never cold because the supply of electricity was erratic, so they held little attraction for us when we trudged to the shops in the unrelenting heat.

There were really no luxuries to spend any money on. And we were grateful for that — because we had no money to spend on luxuries! It was a relief not to have temptation beckoning to us from shop windows or from shopping sites — which thankfully didn’t exist in those days!

If we met up with friends for coffee and a chat, it was at one of our homes. If we wanted to indulge in sinful chocolate cake with all the trimmings, we just had to bake it ourselves or hope that a more culinarily gifted friend would do it for us. When someone’s birthday or anniversary arrived, we came up with innovative ideas for gifts.

Of course, we chafed at all the effort we had to put in for every occasion. And when we went ‘home’ once a year, we walked around wide-eyed, peering in at what we considered the huge variety of items available in the shops in our small hometown, thrilled that we could go out and get what we wanted instead of trying to create it at home from scratch ... “This is civilisation,” we said.

In time, of course, we returned to ‘civilisation’. And very soon, the excitement palled. Suddenly, we found that we needed much more money to see us through each month than we had before; and since there was a lack of it, we had to start budgeting and making hard choices.

It wasn’t easy to drag our son past toy shops that displayed everything from self-pedalled cars big enough for a five-year-old to manoeuvre to ingenious assembly kits and other games for rainy days. It wasn’t easy to convince him to forego the milk shakes and ice-cream sundaes that we had longed for in those long sunny summers and settle for home-made substitutes. It wasn’t easy to turn our back on the shelves of new books and instead scour the pavements for something second-hand (or third or fourth) — and then convince ourselves and him that it was more attractive than everything else we had seen thus far ...

Now it seems to me that we are all better off for having those few years of restraint and renunciation. Because, with all the acquisitions that have happened since then, had we indulged ourselves as we wanted to, we quite likely would not have had space in our house for ourselves.

Cheryl Rao is a journalist based in India.