On coins and joy
How old is your last memory of taking out jumbled currency notes from your pocket, arranging them in the correct order with the right orientation, carefully stacking a few coins over the notes, and swiftly handing them to the shopkeeper before the coins tip over?
For me, this experience happened just a few days ago when I was paying for rotis (also known as chapatis or flatbreads), as the price of a roti had risen from 10 Rs to 12 Rs, therefore allowing me to utilize coins in payment. However, if I omit the last two weeks, my last memory of performing the mentioned series of tasks would be much older. This is because coins nowadays are not commonly used in everyday purchases (you will even rarely find them in pots of beggars). However, if we ponder over the reason for the diminishing use of coins in purchases, we will come across another element: embarrassment. It happens sometimes that upon purchase, a shopkeeper returns some coins as change along with currency notes, but the buyer just takes the paper bills deeming the coins useless, or probably, it’s just because the buyer wants to avoid clattering of coins inside the pocket.
Whatever the case may be, coins still are a part of our currency and if we ourselves do not respect our currency, then how can we expect foreigners to do so?
Besides, I think there is a kind of childish joy associated with receiving coins, possessing coins, playing with coins, and buying with coins. Paying with coins (along with notes) kind of brought me to that nostalgia. A candy still can be bought for 2 Rs if not 1 Rupee; the fact is that with the passage of time, we have forgotten to cherish the little joys in life. In pursuit of some bigger worthwhile goal, we become blind to the little wonders that surround us every day; we become deaf to the music a bird sings with delight; we become dumb to the laugh a mute game can produce.
Ah! that brings to me the memory of my favorite writer, Antoine de Saint Exupery whose graceful words are able to sink the frail boat of heart in a fierce storm of emotions. How true he was in writing these words:
“Gazing at this transfigured desert I remember the games of my childhood-the dark and golden park we peopled with gods; the limitless kingdom we made of this square mile never thoroughly explored, never thoroughly charted. We created a secret civilization where footfalls had a meaning and things a savor known in no other world.
And when we grow to be men and live under other laws, what remains of that park filled with the shadows of childhood, magical, freezing, burning? What do we learn when we return to it and stroll with a sort of despair along the outside of its little wall of gray stone, marveling that within a space so small we should have founded a kingdom that had seemed to us infinite — what do we learn except that in this infinity we shall never again set foot, and that it is into the game and not the park that we have lost the power to enter.”
So it seems that in this game of life, we need to insert a coin to start…
