A LinkedIn post by Rohan Dhawan, entrepreneur and founder of business consulting firm UAbility, has struck a nerve online after he made a candid case for spending generously on personal health, even when family members disapprove.
In the post, Dhawan described the reaction of his 64-year-old uncle upon learning that he pays Rs 30,000 every month to a personal trainer. The uncle, he wrote, looked at him as though he had confessed to setting money on fire, and promptly advised him to take up a public gym membership for Rs 2,000 instead.
Dhawan did not let the comparison go unexamined. He pointed out that the same uncle lives with Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, knees that cannot bend below ninety degrees, and a back problem that has persisted for two decades. The uncle, he noted, spends Rs 20,000 a month on medications and a further Rs 8,000 on a physiotherapist who has not managed to resolve the underlying issues.
Dhawan, who has been lifting weights for eleven years, described his trainer as a former competitive bodybuilder who monitors his form, adjusts his nutrition plan, and follows up personally if he misses a session. He argued that this level of attention has kept him in good health and that the cost is entirely justified given what he can afford.
The broader point he made was about a generational mindset he believes has caused lasting harm. His parents’ generation, he wrote, treated frugality as a moral virtue and consistently placed health spending at the bottom of the priority list. The result, in his view, is that many people save carefully for decades only to spend everything on medical bills after sixty.
He ended the post with a pointed question for his readers: would they rather write a cheque to a personal trainer in their thirties, or to a hospital in their fifties?
The post drew significant engagement, with many readers agreeing that preventive health investment is consistently undervalued in Indian middle-class culture, while others debated whether Rs 30,000 a month is a reasonable or accessible figure for most working professionals.
