12 January 2013, 04:06 PM IST
It has been a long time since my good friends Queenie the Trannie, Ronnie the Waiter and Montoo the Driver have managed to find the bandwidth to meet up and we've been able to spend quality time together, what to do? Business in the pure cash sector that they variously inhabit has been doing very well, thank you, and time is of the essence as well as investment. What do you do with all that cash, after all, in these days of rampant inflation?
Nobody wants a bill anymore, they said, when did you give bills, I asked Queenie, and she said, what do you know, I even had a merchant account for educational services, so that people could swipe their plastic, but not this Service Tax and TDS has made things so complicated that it is back to cash, which we can't put in the bank, at which Ronnie and Montoo said, but Queenie, you carry your bank with you all the time, and so Trannie gave both of them a hit on the head.
Somewhere, a goat saw this, and started bleating in fear.
So anyways, all three of them asked me to point them to a decent jeweller who would ask no questions, and not rip them off either. Not surprisingly, there are many such people all over India lately, whose word and quality of gold bars is their bond. In some ways, it also gives a brilliant insight into why retail investors in equity, mutual funds and other such instruments are not exactly setting the bourses on fire lately.
I mean, I tried to explain gold bonds and certificates to the three of them, and they looked at me. Aghast. You must be soft in the head, said Queenie, we can't trust paper instruments anymore and you want us to do something called "de-mat" and leave it on the internet? Do you not know what a cloud is, can you keep anything there, and even if you keep water, can anybody guess where it will rain, in these days of climate change?
Anycase, they said, your family were zero start refugees from erstwhile West Punjab, what good did all those pieces of paper do?
Such impeccable logic, what can we do, so off we trotted to the jeweller's shop. Where gold and other precious stuff is kept in full view of the public, no tinted glass - unlike on the road outside where the Traffic Police were trying to get it removed from cars and buses.
On the pavement, the goat had, by now, become shish kabab.
So anyways, we are talking to the jeweller, who prefers to remain anonymous but let us call him, hmmmm, by his nickname, Goldie? Nice neutral name, chosen by his parents because that was the colour of the refined hydrogenated oil in which they made amazingly and seriously tasty samosas one generation ago. From the same shop.
So Goldie, how's business, I asked, and he said - wonderful, never been better, thanks to this removal of tinted film from automobile windows. What has this got to do with increased sales of gold, it is like this, said Goldie, most of my customers never really saw the real state of affairs in India as they drove around in cars with dark film and curtains, now all that has gone, and they are so surprised and shocked when they see the real India that something happens, and all of them come running to buy gold.
Are we going to have a Partition again, or what, I asked, because this shop is in the middle of a refugee resettlement colony, and Goldie said, no idea, Sirji, but everybody says that soon our currency notes will have politicians faces on them, and we know the value of that.
At that, I observed how Queenie, Ronnie and Montoo all quietly took their sun-glasses off.
A plate of shish kababs was offered, along with a lemon-soda that had met a grey goose.
You have a point, I remarked to everybody, but what about the people making and selling tinted film? Now there is a totally new usage for this, sirji, what do you think we are wrapping all this cash and gold bricks in lately?
Black money, wrapped in tinted film, has never been so literal as it is now. Gandhiji on our currency notes was one thing. But seeing the black faces of some of the others on our currency soon?
It has been a long time since many of our leaders walked on our roads. Or even looked at the roads. Hopefully, the removal of tinted film from the windows of their cars will change that, and they will step out to see and try to understand why talk of partition type days is doing the rounds again.
And gold moves. South. Safer.
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