Reports of the 25 paise coin’s demise and the expected birth of two-rupee, hundred-rupee and even thousand-rupee coins don’t trouble self-styled Gandhians crusading for financial rectitude in a blaze of publicity. But people who have to worry about the spiralling cost of everything, including Gandhi caps and an unending supply of freshly-laundered crisp white dhotis and kurtas, cannot ignore these warnings of bleak times ahead with money rapidly losing all value.
A chazi, as we schoolboys called the four-anna coin, predecessor of the doomed 25 paise, bought a bottle of Rose and Thistle lemonade with the tantalising marble that no juggling could ever get out. It was a respectable sum to hand across the tuck shop counter or give the box-wallah in return for bright stamp-sized pictures that you dampened and pressed on your arm and, hey presto! you had a colourful tattoo.
The chazi soared to grander heights. “A chavanni membership of the (Congress) party was a badge of honour,” an MP reminded Parliament recently. It also plumbed to abysmal depths. As I have written before in this column, some small boys from Burrabazar at a Republic Day parade burst out chanting “Chavanni! Chavanni!” when the Kolkata Police contingent, pot-bellied and panting, shambled past. It was their nickname for constables though I suspect the latter already demanded far more than 25 paise for the least favour.
The 50-paise coin, equivalent of the old eight annas, is probably next on the hit list. It’s already gone in one sense for never, in the dozens of times I have flown out of Kolkata airport, has the newsagent in the terminal given me back the change when I have bought a Rs 2.50 newspaper. He always opens his drawer, gazes into it and murmurs, “Sorry but I don’t have 50 paise.” Never does he suggest taking two rupees. He always takes three, selling the paper at a premium.
Others too play that game. I was glad when the fee for an hour’s parking was increased from Rs 7 to Rs 10 because that’s what the parking man outside the high court demanded anyway. He always rapped out a peremptory “10 rupees!” when you returned to your parked car. “I don’t keep change,” he retorted when you pointed out timidly that you had parked for a bare 25 minutes and a full hour’s charge was Rs 7. Now, a 10-rupee note will change hands without argument.
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Coins once meant gold, silver and copper. Devi Chaudhurani’s gold mohur in Bankim Chandra Chatterji’s eponymous novel, finds its equivalent in the gold sovereign that William Boot, the innocent hero of Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, is done out of. Tradition decreed welcoming a bride or a newborn with a guinea. But it wasn’t all give; there was take too: the new son-in-law who paid obeisance to his mother-in-law with a guinea had to be blessed with two. But just as rupees, annas and pies became decimal paise, metal yielded to nickel-brass, cupro-nickel, aluminium-bronze and aluminium.
Liberia was left moneyless when a bunch of Lebanese traders with tin trunks mopped up all the US dollar notes that were the country’s currency. India can always print and mint more but I have known children’s piggy banks painstakingly stuffed over the years with two, three and five paise coins going to waste. Five-rupee coins are becoming thinner and lighter.
With legions at his beck and call and the mightiest in the land at his feet, Baburao Hazare should ask why our savings are steadily being robbed. Paper money was bad enough, and for that sleight of hand we must thank China whose seventh century Tang emperors first thought of taking the public for a ride. When Europe introduced notes in the 14th century, the holder was entitled to exchange them at the official bank for the equivalent value in gold or silver. Arvind Kejriwal, economist, erstwhile income-tax official, activist and Hazare’s right-hand man, should demand the meaning of “I promise to pay the bearer the sum of one hundred rupees” on a Rs 100 note. How will the governor of the Reserve Bank of India redeem his solemn word? By exchanging one 100-rupee note for another?
We are being short-changed all the way. Self-proclaimed champions of justice aren’t interested in complaints that won’t make newspaper headlines, draw TV cameras or force the prime minister’s intercession. The really poor haven’t flocked to the Ramlila grounds. Just as protest fasting is for those who never go hungry, coins are for the poor… and numismatists.