Deadline of a Lifeline

In an interesting coincidence, our daring new PM walks across the 50-day lifeline he asked for, and we people walk through another brand-new year filed with hope and dreams. New years are good to have. To me it is that time of the year you feel so special for no tangible reason whatsoever. You somehow just feel quite happy and excited and you share the joy with your friends and family. It’s a good time to be in. And I so much wish we all have many more of such days so that the happiness and brotherhood (sisters included as well) keep coming back to us often.

If New Years are about brotherhood, I’ve been lucky this year. I just had my 50 day ‘extended’ New Year where I had many a chance to feel the brotherhood over and over again. I suddenly started speaking to complete strangers I met at ATMs and bank counters. And they were extremely courteous people with lots of patience and hope. I mean, did we even notice these human bodies strolling in front of us prior to demonetization! But now suddenly, over the last 50 days we all started feeling an invisible bond of commonness – the frustration of running around in vain for proof of our money!

A day before Christmas I spent around 20 minutes in a shop trying to swipe my card for something I needed and had just bought. I then moved towards the 4 ATMs available in the locality where I got to meet some of my ‘new’ brothers and sisters. To give credit where it should be, one ATM even told me “I am being Serviced”. Though at that time it felt like “Screw You!”, I am impressed at the technological advancement where these machines too have learned to be nice to people.

Back at the store I again tried my card for around 5 minutes and finally promised to pay him the next day in cash. Yeah! “Mere Pyaare Deshwasi….by hook or crook I will get my hands onto some currency notes and I shall pay thy money!” I’m not sure if it was the Mere Pyaare part or the fact that he knew me through one of my employees that did the trick. Anyways he let me go with the things with a verbal promise to return with cash. I still doubt it’s the hindi that really got at him!

Two days after Christmas I walked into a bank counter to pay my son’s school fee. Something that I had been doing for the past 3 years and never took me more than 5-10 min max. And here I was waiting for my turn to come, close to an hour after entering the bank! To be frank with you, that actually was a confusing phase for me. One side of my brain told me to feel proud that I am supporting my nation by standing in a queue for something that actually needs to take just 5 min. In one of those moments I thought of our jawans standing at the borders and I felt proud to be able to stand there inside an air conditioned banking counter with cozy sofas, water dispensers and even toilets that were friendly to the physically challenged.

But some other part of my brain was telling me that someone had just fucked up my life. It has been close to 2 months since I saw anything other than a 2000 rupee note from an ATM. And even that has become a rare vision, seen only if I am lucky enough to be at the right place at the right time. Sounds familiar, right?

Now at least some of you will tell me that I am an elitist and that’s why I don’t want to go wait in the queue during the early morning hours in hope for the ‘money-men’ to come and load the ATMs. Yeah! It does sound very empowering and socialist. But you calling me an elitist is just like calling Osama Bin Laden a Saint because he chose to leave the comforts that his billion dollar empire could guarantee.

Over the past 50 days my daring government has brought out 74 notifications and announcements that included several roll backs. To be precise 53 from RBI and 21 from the Central Government. Reactive Governance is not a bad thing. But when we are dealing with something as important as what we were told the government was trying to do, I’m not sure this is an appreciable strategy. The transition from talking about black money to focusing on digital payments without any measure whatsoever to strengthen the existing technology back bone is not very confidence inspiring. The fact that even as we crossed our 50 day mark my prime minister was unable to give me a clear roadmap for removing these monetary ‘laxman rekhas’ is quite disturbing. I’m still unsure if I should wait for a Ram or a Raavan to take me out of this mess. More importantly I’m not even sure what more ‘Agni Pareekshas’ I’ll have to go through to prove wrong every other doubt that arises in this particular Ram’s mind.

Sometimes I wonder if there really was not a better way to do these things. The knee jerk reaction by the finance ministry when they realised that the money coming back into the banking system might just exceed the value of the ones demonetized and the rollback within 24 hours due to public outrage is not something that reassures me that my government really knows what it is doing. If we agree to the requests by Bangladesh and Nepal to convert the Indian currencies lying there we surely will cross the demonetized value even now. And then there are the alleged crores lying in cooperative societies. The fact that the value of notes being deposited back into the system is higher than what was demonetized is actually proof that illegal currencies existed in the market. It is also proof that someone somewhere has made a fortune in helping covert these currencies into legal tender. And my Government showing signs as to they did not expect this to happen is like a class 10 student writing a class 7 exam and complaining of an out of syllabus question!

In between all this, knowing that people from my Governments party made unprecedently large transactions months before the 8/11 announcement is disheartening. Knowing that my Government lobbied with international agencies for cooked up ratings is not very reassuring. My finance minister coming up with concocted figures to support this move rather than reassuring me about the ride ahead is quite irritating. Who, atleast with minimum senses, wants a finance minister to tell him that tax earnings will shoot up in the initial months of demonetization when people frantically try to bring money into the system!

At the end of this 50-day period I’ve personally learned a few lessons. Brand promotion and Governance are two entirely different things. Good Theatrics should never be equated with Good Governance. And hate/distrust for one should not be equated with admiration/belief for another. Unfortunately, these are the things that are now frequently getting mixed up with us Indians. A little sincere and unbiased introspection would make you understand what I mean.

Questioning the earlier Governments deeds in the last 60 odd years every time someone raises a doubt, is on one hand ignoring the fact that every good thing we take for granted today is because of some positive step taken somewhere in the past. And on the other, it is like saying my murderer step father is good since my father was a serial killer! Now, a choice we individually need to make is whether we really want to again wait for ‘the kid’ to cry out that the ‘King is nude’, which he surely seems to be at this point of time.