Being cashless: the other way round

I never imagined a day would come when I would have to shell out a hundred rupees for a mango, but that is what I did the other day, with tears in my eyes. There was a time, just before the last war, when I would have been laughed out of court, had I paid even a paisa for a mango or, for that matter, for a jackfruit or a coconut or a pineapple, for they were not the kind you bought in the market. They grew on trees and all you had to do was pluck them. This was, as I said, before the war, when a rupee was a rupee, but it was so scarce that you rarely saw it. My uncle, a shrewd businessman, was running our family farms, but we consumed what we grew, and there was very little hard cash at the end of the day. Most of the work on the farms was done by young boys like me during the vacati

This article was originally published on November 07, 2021.