Standing in a line in Arambol, Goa, sweating along with at
least another 100 people in a space not much bigger than the double room I
rent. It’s one of the more humid days I’ve encountered in the last ten days of
my return to south India, a place of adventures I have a great fondness for.
And adventure is how I viewed this little foray, hitching a
ride on the back of a dread-locked local’s moped, getting in line at the State
Bank of India with the old, the crippled and the foreign, as we’re all leveled
to the same position: trying to get some money we can actually use before the
cash in our hands, purses and trouser pockets is labelled old and useless for
good. The rumour has it that we have 2 weeks to queue for hours in banks that
may or may not have enough of the new bills to exchange for the nearly
redundant notes. OK if you only have 4000 rupees (about 40 quid)- the maximum
allowance I’ve heard of in any bank. Those with more MUST deposit it in a bank
account. Hmm- I smell a dirty rat!
The Indian government, 5 days ago, deemed it necessary, on
their grounds of tackling black-marketeers, to withdraw the largest notes that
existed in the currency- 500 and 1000 rupee bills. Apparently shifty business
men and those without bank accounts have huge piles of the stuff sitting about-
under mattresses or in their bras?
The ‘transition period’ is causing much speculation, drama
and queuing all over the country. Business people in nearly every shop I’ve
been into this week have either had to refuse business because they have no
money (the ATMS were closed for days), have to accept payment ‘later’ because
they don’t want to accept the old notes anymore or have no change even if they
are willing to accept the old bills. They’re losing a lot of money as the days
turn into weeks.
The more accepting among us (I’m not one of them!) views
all this as teething problems and resign themselves to sitting (or standing!)
out the next 10, 14, 20 days of confusion and, let’s call it, scarcity. These
people are still naïve enough to believe that the government is acting in our
best interests. I have other opinions…
As I waited, trying to remain patient and positive while in
a line that didn’t seem to move forward an inch after half an hour, the seed of
an idea entered my head: ‘What if we all just pretended that we hadn’t heard
the rumours? What if, like some really savvy restaurant owners and shop people,
we continued to use and accept our old monopoly money and carried on business
as usual. In other words, what if we collectively resisted this madness? What
if we listened to our hearts and said ‘What would I rather be doing right now?
Standing knee deep in sweat next to the Bank of India sign laughingly extolling
it’s promise of customer satisfaction? Or earning a day’s wages, having a sit
down in my shop, chatting with my neighbour, drinking a lovely chai, sunbathing
on the tropical beach on my 1 annual holiday a year?
Someone’s having a laugh at our expense people!!
I could scream ‘Wake up!’ but to be fair, there I was in the
queue, worrying that I hadn’t jumped through all the hoops of form-filling,
document photocopying and general bum-licking that I feel we should all be
getting rebelliously sick and tired of.
It almost brought me to tears to see the contrast in the
faces of people standing in line (resigned, concerned, worried, angry) to those,
happy and relieved, who had succeeded in getting their brand spanking new funny
money- different colour, different denomination- same bullshit! All smiles they
fought their way back out of the ram packed bank and back to living their
lives.
And that brings me to another spark of insight I shared with
a fellow yoga student I bumped into in the queue: This is just a taste of what
is to come. This is the kind of scene we will grow to expect all over the world.
Europe and the USA next. Greece has of course already tasted this bitterness. Suddenly,
without much forewarning our very hard-earned wages are worth nothing. All of a
sudden we find ourselves queuing up for hours on end to make our slave wages
spendable.
Since when does one HAVE TO HAVE a bank account? Since when
was it not our choice to keep our money wherever we see fit?
Since the world financial systems started to fail. Since
governments world-wide started to twist the thumb-screws of control ever
tighter.
I do believe that there are even wider than financial
ramifications to this government-created chaos: Divide and rule. Instill fear. Promote
a feeling of scarcity.
Even with the new 2000 rupee note I queued so hard to get, I
was this evening given change in the old, decrepit 1000 and 500 notes! Not only
are people worried that their hard-earned money will no longer amount to anything,
the situation has reduced us to cunning and underhand ways, causing less than
harmonious interactions between customer and business man.
Coincidentally (although I no longer believe in coincidences)
I was watching an interview, last night, with a Zulu sangoma, one of the keepers
of the history and the wisdom of the Zulus, Credo Mutwa. A very credible and knowledgeable
gentleman, who foresees the use of money and the financial system to, as he
called it, ‘reduce us all to beggars’. I saw that today. Very, very clearly. It
might just be the beginning, masked by the government as a way to deal with
illegality and therefore to help us all in the long run, but this is the
beginning of mass chaos, even more hardship for the ordinary people.
Talking of which, the people I shared the line with in that
bank were not crooked business men. Maybe one or two but in front of me were
the elderly, barely firm enough to fight their way through the line to get a
form to fill, women poor as poor can be, Nepali, trying as they might to make a
bit of money to send home to a country brought to its knees for trying to be
really democratic, small business people and foreign tourists.
If you just stand and observe, you can see the truth or at
least more of the truth than the powers that be would have you see.
May we all see more clearly the wrongs that are being
inflicted upon us. May we begin to resist peacefully and collectively this
inhuman madness.
And please God! may the government of India print off enough low denomination bills so that someone in the country has some change!!
