every time padma iyer buys a banana or obliges a beggar with two rupees she makes a reluctant mental note she has to go home and tell her husband in his world these are important events he jots it all down in a small notebook under different categories bananas come under food and the two rupees for the beggar under welfare this is part of a 28yearold understanding between the couple every rupee has to be accounted for he is the meticulous type says padma proudly she knows her husband is not a miser the result of all this diligent accounting is that he knows he has earned rs 229 crore and spent rs 156 crore in the last 2816 years translating half a life into earnings and expenditure is the unique entertainment of 60yearold padmanabhan iyer of thane for him noting down daily expenses is an unavoidable part of personality like hairstyle it is not meant to have any consequence its just a hobby says the bespectacled man a retired mechanical engineer he is sitting in his living room which is full of his creations the ornate wooden shelf above the entrance the scene on the wall the photo frame with 29 photos he had taken of his usbased son that shows his growth every year since birth the obsession to keep accounts began one day when he was working in acc chairman nani palkhivala delivered a speech stressing the importance of a balance sheet we have to keep an account of the amount spent per every rupee earned he had said this made an impression on the young tamil engineer who decided to apply the principle to his domestic life toohe zeroed in on 12 broad categories of domestic expenditure including food entertainment house education income tax and medicine in small colourful notebooks where god is featured on the front page he jotted down all domestic expenses against these categories all sorts of bills are clubbed under house newspapers for some reason are relegated to entertainment here there are also categories called mother and child for expenses on his mother and son ashwinbelow these are check lists for unpredictable visitors like maid servants and the milkman a tick mark indicates the days they didnt turn up two pages of each notebook are enough to chronicle an entire monetary month if there is no expenditure in a particular category on certain days the gaps are happily filled with an x savings indicators like provident fund and loan payments are added towards the end he subtracts the expenditure from the income and tallies the figure with his actual savings every night he devotes half an hour to this exercise milestones like six months or a big expenditure of say a lakh are celebrated with a blackandwhite piechart or a bar graph his wife hates accounts but grudgingly plays auditor at the end of every month on his request she finds greater joy though at the end of each month