So, as soon as I got a decent job after engineering college, the first itch was to give back. Transferring a lump-sum to your parental savings account is just rearranging the digits of their bank balance, and is totally not Facebook-worthy. It has to be something that they can rub on the faces of doubting relatives. Hence, you need something dramatic, something photogenic — like a luxury experience.

So, I decided to send them to Goa, a mythical land propped up by Bollywood, which parents from the Indo-Gangetic belt treated as a dream destination. The other option was to send them ‘abroad’, but my salary couldn’t really afford that. I booked a decent 4-star hotel, with complimentary breakfast (where, I knew, they would just have masala dosa every day). I also booked flight tickets.

I was aware that as much as I was doing this for them, I was also doing it for myself — to feel good, to feel redeemed, to feel complete. “He is going beyond his means to make his parents happy.” But it was a mistake. As soon as the parents came out of the airport, wearing straw hats, in three-fourths and coolers, taxi-driving millionaires accosted them, and made them fork up the equivalent of a flight fare for a Maruti-Suzuki Alto to their resort. My parents didn’t talk to each other the entire journey, reeling from post-scam clarity.

They spent the night, and the next day, when the complimentary breakfast wore off, and they felt like eating again, they casually opened the bedside menu. Against the veg biryani, a favourite room order, the price listed in a fancy font was ₹560. That’s when they realised I had made a mistake. Your idea of luxury is not the same as your parents’ idea of luxury. They don’t like a secluded 5-star hotel; they like a place from where they can walk to a bustling market. That’s how they did tourism all their lives. They have been value-conscious all along.

Sure, you can afford a ₹600-masala dosa at the hotel’s restaurant, but they can never appreciate the taste knowing the price. Their core achievement in life, they will tell you, is that they managed to create so much with so little. “We had nothing,” they would say. And out of “nothing”, they created a decent life, a house, a well-educated campus-placed offspring, and an intact self-esteem. They pride themselves for maximising value.

So, relax; you don’t have to prove a point. Let them live, just be a facilitator. Some might argue having no new experiences, sampling no new cuisines, visiting no new places, and just going with the tried and tested, is no way to live. That you by allowing them this you are failing to maximise the value of their remaining years. But this is a trait they self-admittedly appreciate.

For parents, a child is always a 10-year old. He may be a skilled engineer or a doctor, but is still a child when it comes to managing money. Parents always regret that they couldn’t transfer their most prized skill — value maximising — to their kid who thinks a 600-rupee dosa is reasonable.

The majority of Tier 2 and 3 dwellers have a similar mindset, across states, caste, and creed. This is something uniquely Indian. It is nearly impossible to proselytise them out of the Indian middle class at the age of 60.

Remember, the only thing that makes them age fast is stress. No diet or exercise helps. Your only job is to de-stress them. By being in touch, by letting them feel you are there to listen to their neighbourhood gossip, to listen to how they bargained well at a garment shop and many such little nothings. To make them feel you are in the other room. Your well-being and proximity are what they crave. Everything else is ancillary. Hence, the next time, book a place which doesn’t shame them to change their habits and get their socks washed for ₹250.

Abhishek Asthana is a tech and media entrepreneur and tweets as @gabbbarsingh. The views expressed are personal