There’s a giant laminated five hundred rupee note sitting on my desk. It’s not mine, and I am pretty sure even the most oblivious of market vendors would consider it legal tender, but nonetheless it irks me that it has appeared. Even in their small valuable form, they are the most useless of notes, since you can only really use them in expensive bars and restaurants without raising eyebrows.
In any case, shortly afterwards a broad middle-aged Indian walks in, and grabs the note, clearly expressing delight about having found it. This is Chanchal, the man who shares my office cabin. He’s the man in charge of designing the graphics for the newspaper. Like all graphics guys (and techies), his office is strewn with bits of miscellany, and scraps of old versions of the paper pasted together that clearly represent some kind of private joke. There are outsize pictures of rifle shooter Abhinav Bindra, Indian’s only gold medallist from the previous summer, a bunch of snooker balls, various pictures of Bollywood actresses, and a diagram of how to find your G-spot (which he designed). Now, he is folding up the rupee note into some kind of origami object.
“It’s a rupee boat,” he says, nodding enthusiastically. There are three classes of people in the world I consider the most difficult to communicate with: Physicists, 11 year-old children, and guys who are really into graphic design. Chanchal sees the confused look on my face. “You see,” he says, in the slow loud voice he reserves for young foreign interns, “it’s going to be a rupee boat, and we’re going to have it sailing on a sea of Indian stock market.” This is where he chuckles in self-appreciation. “It’s like, ‘is it going to sink, or are we going to float?'”
Downstairs, at the newspaper’s sister economic journal, people are running around and throwing papers. It’s pretty unusual in this office for anyone to put so much as a hop in their step on the way to the coffee machine. The stock markets are crashing, everything is red, or preceded by a downward arrow or a minus sign. Apocalypse is nigh. The Guardian today reported that the stock market had dropped 800 points and the rupee had slumped to a record low. When the US bailout happened a few days ago, the Times of India wrote a slightly smug piece the capitalist giant softening along the socialist path. Now, everyone is asking themselves whether India could afford to do the same thing. But with a tax system that is dubious at the best of times, the idea of such funds looks fairly unlikely.
Most Indians (like myself and most of the people I know) really have no idea what this means for us. With barely three figures in our bank accounts at the moment, Malena and I quipped, we really have nothing to lose. But someone’s worried, and the word ‘recession’ was something I grew up with and was always accompanied by worry lines on my parents’ foreheads.
In the marketplaces, there are no crashing red charts, or talk of the depreciation of the rupee. There are two more immediate things to worry about: terrorism, and flooding. Chanchal, as he is folding a sail into his paper boat, warns me that I should stay far away from the markets on a Saturday. He says that most of the terrorist attacks have happened on Saturdays. “We call them Black Saturdays now,” he says. And then there are festivals, which he also says we should avoid. Delhi got away lightly at Dussehra (security checks being a pat on the pocket and a push into the crowd and still no one with a incendiary device got through. Sri Lanka didn’t get away so easily). India won’t get away as lightly again. What seems to us a bustling, jerking crowd, is a huge depreciation on the weekend market scrum that was common a few months ago.
And what the food market still sells is rocketing in price. Not because of the value of currency or the price of oil, but because floods in the north of the country have meant widespread crop damage. The price of tomatoes has risen to over three times as much. The price of potatoes – so beloved of Indian cooks – has more than doubled. The same goes for okra, cauliflower, capiscum: almost everything you could name that makes up a traditional Indian meal. And so the women who take their weekly budget to market, waiting on the needs of their husbands and children, are forced to become resourceful, or else eat less.
So, the besuited journalists and speculators stare at the markets. But it is another kind of market that frightens a billion Indians. An economic downturn doesn’t mean buying economy brand microwave lasagne, taking one less beach holiday a year or spending less at Topshop. The ordinary Indian wouldn’t even be touched by the Dow Jones, or the FTSE index. They face the same economic crises several times a year, every time there is flood or storm and the crop fails. And it directly effects what, if anything goes on the table.
Meanwhile, Chanchal is still folding his giant 500 rupee note, and chuckling to himself as he tries to devise the perfect stock market sea on which to sail it.
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