A few weeks ago, someone at work mentioned he was booking a Tirupati trip for his mother.

I asked him about it the next day, and he pulled up the TTD website to walk me through the options.

₹300 for Special Entry, which skips the 12-hour free queue and gets you in within about two hours.

₹500 gets you in faster, and ₹1,000, faster still.

Then there's the SRIVANI Trust VIP Break Darshan: a ₹10,000 donation to the temple trust, plus a ₹500 ticket, per person.

His mother walks in, stands 2 feet from Lord Venkateswara, receives aarti, theertham, prasadam, and walks out, in 10 to 15 minutes.

He booked the ₹10,000 one.

His mother hadn't asked for it; she'd have been happy with the ₹300 ticket and the wait.

He did it to make things as easy on her as possible. And, honestly, because it made him feel like he'd done it properly.

When she came back, he asked how it was.

"Bahut achha tha, beta," she said, and showed him the photos from the trip.

Later, he told me, his uncle asked about the trip at a family gathering.

His mother said, "Usne sab arrange kar diya tha."

Nobody asked if he'd gone with her or what the darshan felt like. The fact that he'd arranged it, and spent well… that's what the whole conversation was about.

And then this week I came across a study about a daycare in Israel that made me rethink the whole thing.

In 2000, Uri Gneezy and Aldo Rustichini ran a field experiment across 10 daycares in Haifa.

Parents sometimes picked up their kids late.

There was no penalty, the teachers just waited, and parents felt guilty about it.

Late pickups averaged about 8 per week per centre.

In week five, six of the daycares introduced a ₪10 fine (about $3) for late pickup.

Late pickups nearly doubled.

Before the fine, being late meant imposing on a teacher who was doing you a kindness by staying past hours.

Once the fine existed, being late was something you paid for, like buying an extra 20 minutes of childcare, and the guilt evaporated.

The fine had converted a social obligation into a market transaction. Parents weren't taking advantage of someone's kindness anymore; they were paying for a service.

When the researchers removed the fine, late pickups stayed high. Once a social norm becomes a price, the conversion seems to stick.

Dan Ariely tested a similar idea at MIT.

People did boring tasks either as a favour or for decent pay, and both groups worked hard.

A third group got paid almost nothing and barely tried.

The moment a price enters the picture, the brain switches from the first to the second.

Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams (TTD) runs a ₹5,258 crore annual budget and have a net worth of ₹3 lakh crore. Hundi collections alone bring ₹1,729 crore. 

They are wealthier than most Indian conglomerates.

These tiers are not for grandma. She'd wait 24 hours and call it part of the experience.

They're designed for her son or daughter in Hyderabad, who opens the TTD app during a lunch break, picks the ₹10,500 option, fills in her Aadhaar number, and feels something tight in their chest loosen.

Travel companies have caught on. 

Pikme sells pilgrimage packages directly to adult children arranging trips for aging parents, pitching "real-time updates to concerned family members" as a core feature.

Their customer isn't the pilgrim who goes; it's the child paying for the trip from another city.

A generation ago, pilgrimage was a family thing... You went together, eighteen hours on a train to Varanasi.

The crowd, the heat, standing in line with your mother, and the discomfort was all a part of the experience.

India's religious tourism generated ₹1.34 lakh crore in 2022, with 1,433 million domestic pilgrim visits, growing at 10% a year.

Dan Ariely would spot what's buried in those numbers right away.

The 12-hour free queue operates on social norms.

Waiting is part of being a devotee. Nobody counts the hours because counting would reduce it to a transaction.

The ₹10,500 VIP queue operates on market norms. You paid for a service, and the 10 minutes is what you bought.

If the darshan runs 12 minutes, part of your brain might wonder whether you got your money's worth.

Two completely different psychological frames inside the same temple.

Gneezy and Rustichini's finding maps directly onto this.

Every family that books the VIP tier is doing what those parents in Haifa did, which is paying a price to discharge what used to be a duty.

Each time that swap happens, the duty gets lighter. After a while it feels less like fulfilling an obligation and more like paying a bill.

"Usne sab arrange kar diya tha." is a rece.pt.

It proves the obligation was met. Whether his mother wished he'd stood next to her in that queue is a question that never gets asked.

The whole system rests on one assumption: that adult children feel obliged to spend on this.

"We sent maa and papa to Char Dham" means something.

It carries weight at family gatherings and on WhatsApp groups.

But Gneezy and Rustichini discovered that once a social norm turns into a market transaction, it doesn't turn back.

Even after the fine ended in Haifa, the parents kept showing up late, as the price had overwritten the guilt.

If pilgrimage fully becomes a transaction for my generation, the next one inherits something different from what we did.

They'll look at Tirupati the way they look at any other premium service and decide whether it's worth the price.

TTD's ₹3 lakh crore empire sits on centuries of that obligation. The pricing tiers are monetising every layer of it.

What happens when there's no obligation left to monetise?

I think I owe my parents a trip where I'm standing in the queue with them :)

Hit reply and tell me: when did you last go on a pilgrimage with your parents and stand in the queue with them?

I read every email.

Until next week,
Ritesh