A FAMILY consisting of dear friends, who had been with many of us for a very long time, are no longer seen. They, eight of them to be precise, practically deserted us. Actually, we have killed them. Theoretically, some of them are still not dead, but convulsing in the ICU. Like any other denials issued by government to play down the number of casualties in any fight or natural calamity, still not proclaimed any of them as dead, kind of alive, but definitely not kicking. I am talking about the dearest junior cousin of our main currency (rupee), the one and only ‘paisa’.
I really do not know clearly, at what precise time the ‘paisa’ was born. It does not matter much, since the inception of my fiscal knowledge, the second incarnation of the paisa had already taken place. It was aptly called naya (new) paisa. Before this took place, one rupee was divided into sixteen ‘annas’ (not to be confused with the beautiful annas like Kournikova or Ivanovic).
For the uninitiated, one anna used to be four paisas. That made one rupee equivalent to sixty-four (64) paisa. This was consistent with the binary / hexadecimal concept; the newly independent nation (actually a few years later) discarded the legacy of the British system in this area also, when wholesale introduction of decimal system was taking place in other measurement fields as well. If my memory serves me right, the naya paisa was introduced in the year 1956, as one-hundredth of a rupee (ie, one rupee was equivalent to 100 naya paisa). Obviously, this was much simpler to follow.
However, though colloquially, the ‘anna’ still continued to exist, albeit with a different definition. One anna started being equal to six Naya Paisa (up from four paisa). This made 16 annas (solah anna) to a rupee. To take care of the four naya paisa difference (100 – 16 X 6), one naya paisa each was distributed to each quarter rupee. As an example, one, two, three and four annas meant, six, 12, 19 and 25 naya paisa respectively.
Like any other entity on earth, our dear new (naya) paisa also started aging. I didn’t notice when it shred off the ‘new’ tag and being called only ‘paisa’, in the same manner, a new bride metamorphose into a ‘wife’. Not only the name but the ‘chehra’ (the look and material) also started changing. The most major change was by using more and more aluminium.
Being a much lighter metal, your pocket had started feeling empty, despite you needed to carry more coins due to rapid inflations, which were the order of those days. Specifically, the round copper one paisa coin changed to square aluminium. Two paisa has taken a wavy circle, same as 10, with smaller size. The fate of five was similar to others with change in weight. A new twenty paisa coin was introduced. The 25 and 50 didn’t change much; perhaps these didn’t use aluminium, but they became smaller and smaller, both in size and purchasing power.
The final death knell perhaps started when the one rupee coin was introduced. After that, the story is so well-known for all of us, it is not worth repeating. As I said at the start, that the paisa is not yet dead, though in Delhi and neighbourhoods, paisa exists only in print, but not accepted at all. Kolkata and Eastern zone, paisa coins are still accepted and so are in many places in South, for obvious reasons of these areas are financially modest compared to Delhi. The mother dairy franchises give cardboard tokens, which they recognise, but, not a 50-paisa coin, telling ‘nobody will take it’. This is despite my offer that, I have taking milk from you for last ten years and continue to do so for at least another ten.
Almost all of us had been accumulating paisa coins (not talking about coin collection hobbies) in piggy-banks or an envelope, deep inside some drawer. We also managed to spend it when we become little older, less from the point of view of maturity, more due to higher need as avenues of spending increases exponentially. So those helped to handle the deficit with respect to the budgetary support from the parents. Some persons, including my wife, who carried her childhood too far, have still kept quite a few handy. Perhaps, may be useful as a collectors’ item twenty five years down the timeline.
Perhaps time is not far off, when we have to device a new term for 100 rupees and the rupee becomes its paisa-equivalent. This may be a nice food for thought for our fiscal masters.
