– Suresh Subrahmanyan is a Bengaluru-based former advertising professional

There are worse things in life than death. Have you ever spent an evening with an insurance salesman? — Woody Allen.

By any yardstick, insurance is a sound concept, predicated on the principle that should any misfortune befall one, be it health, life, property, accident, theft, fire – in fact, pretty much anything that you possess which is valuable and vulnerable to damage or loss, can be insured and you can claim compensation. Provided, of course, that you have not been tardy with your annual premium payments. It must be conceded that getting some money back after losing a limb or two in a road accident or being charred beyond recognition in a fire is scarce comfort, but it is some solace, the raison d’être for taking out an insurance policy in the first place. You are also liable to benefit by something called ‘no claim bonus’ whereby, if you have been a good boy (or girl) and paid your premiums without making any claim, the value of your insurance increases by leaps.

Insurance can also be taken out against specific body parts that can affect a person’s livelihood. Musicians like Bruce Springsteen, Keith Richards, Tina Turner, Madonna and many others have insured their voices or fingers (of instrumentalists) for millions of dollars. This (the insurance) would apply equally to classical musicians and to top-of-the-line sportspersons who depend almost entirely on their hands and legs for their record-breaking performances. Similar information on celebrated Indian musicians, I have not been able to garner. Musicians can also be insured for ‘opportunity loss’ should their engagements be cancelled due to factors beyond their control, resulting in loss of income.

It is understandable that among the poor, it’s very difficult to convince people to part with hard-earned cash towards insurance. We took out an accident insurance policy for our driver. Tragically, he was involved in a road accident and lost his life. We now hope the money his family would get from the insurance company would go some way towards alleviating their financial distress. Which brings me to the process of getting the compensation and the hellish paperwork and torture involved.

It is well-known that the insurance business works on the principle that the greater the volume of clients insured, the theory of probability will ensure that the number of clients they need to shell out money to will be far less than the number insured. It is a fail-safe business model. Except when there are natural calamities or pandemics. More often than not, the attention given by insurance agents, the enthusiasm shown and promises made prior to completing an insurance sale, is directly in inverse proportion to the service one receives when one faces serious health/ injury issues and makes legitimate claims on the insurance company.

The other oddity about personal insurance is that, from the quantum of premiums to cost of medical treatment, things get impossibly hard as you age. The form-filling alone can drive one up the wall. When you are young, fit and healthy without a care in the world, insurance agents will be all over you like a swarm of bees buzzing around a pot of honey. Everything is an absolute doddle. They will even take care of the form-filling. It’s when those creaky, arthritic joints start playing up that you come up against the odds.

I accept that I may not be projecting an entirely fair picture of our friends from the world of insurance. Sweeping generalizations can be misleading and cynicism comes easily. That said, we have had some pleasant experiences, only over the mobile phones of course. Nowadays you can count yourself lucky if you manage to get a clear enough signal to follow what the person at the other end is saying. I’ll say this for our insurance friends. They leave absolutely nothing to chance. There is this ‘Act of God’ provision cunningly tucked away in very small print somewhere in their dossier, hidden craftily to ensure you miss it.

If your home gets washed away by flash floods that may be deemed an Act of God, so you may or may not be entitled to compensation. Read the small print with a powerful magnifying glass. It is mystifying why the blame for natural disasters should be laid at God’s door. On the other hand, if your home is destroyed by fire due to an unattended electrical fault, the insurance blokes might be reluctantly willing to cough up provided the ‘unattended’ part escapes their eagle eyes. It’s all about how you evaluate risk and the importance you attach to it.

In the final analysis, insurance is a bit like having to take a strong and bitter medicine. It is supposed to be good for you but is awful to swallow. Here’s Sylvia Plath, acclaimed poet and the tragic author of The Bell Jar, who was clinically depressed and took her own life, on the subject — “My mother had taught shorthand and typing to support us since my father died, and secretly she hated it and hated him for dying and leaving no money because he didn’t trust insurance salesmen.”