Seeing is not believing

When it comes to the decision to demonetise Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes, the divide is very clear. There are those against it and there are those in favour of it. A few days after demonetisation I went looking for a medicine post midnight. The medicine shop insisted that they would take a card payment only if I bought stuff worth Rs 200. Otherwise, they wanted cash. When I insisted on paying through a card, they relented. But finally, the card wouldn't work and I had to pay with whatever little cash I had. When I shared this experience on social media, a family friend responded with how I was trying to mislead everyone, given that in his locality, the shopkeepers were taking card payments for as little as Rs 20. I wasn't trying to mislead I was just trying to share my experience, without really drawing any conclusions from it. In late December, a schoolmate of mine posted a news report about the movie Dangal racing towards a collection of Rs 200 crore. He then questioned as to where the currency shortage was that demonetisation critics were talking about; the point being that if people were watching Dangal how they could have been short on currency. What he forgot to take into account was the fact that Dangal was an Aamir Khan movie. Khan is a superstar who does one movie in a few years. People had generally stayed away from theatres between early November and late December, when Dan

This article was originally published on March 04, 2017.