Cashless in la-la land

‘He lends out money gratis and brings down the rate of usance here with us in Venice.’ Shylock, Merchant of Venice.

Most of us have credit and debit cards these days, tucked away in slits in our bulging wallets and squeezed into our back pockets. Not to mention driving license, Aadhaar card, medical insurance card and all things plastic, contributing to the battle of the bulge. Hard cash plays a minor walk-on part, if that. Credit and debit cards are essentially the same things, only the credit cards take a while longer to inflict the pain on your bank balance, but that is compensated by their charging a punitive interest rate. You know what they say. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Debit cards, however, are more direct. Swipe one of those and it is bye-bye moolah. Hasta la vista.  These cards are linked to our bank accounts and one’s credit card brand could be any one of the well-known names like Mastercard, Visa, American Express and a host of others. In addition to these cards, various online vendors like Amazon, Flipkart, Big Basket et al, from whom we place orders on a regular basis, entice and exhort us to deposit varying sums of money in their ‘wallets,’ the easier to place orders online without having to go to the trouble of credit / debit card rigmaroles like keeping an eye on the expiry dates, the monthly limits, mad rush to key in the OTP and so on. Forgive me, dear reader, if I am preaching to the converted. Are these the ‘plastic revolutionaries’ that poets and songwriters of yesteryear wrote so presciently about?

Lest we forget, there are also various UPI digital payment options like BHIM, Google Pay, Phone Pe, Pay Pal and Paytm amongst others. The embattled Paytm is currently in strife and under the scanner while we poor sods are still trying to figure out the implications. Meanwhile their chief executive has been shown the door and those of us who have placed our trust and money in Paytm are left wondering if we have not been taken for a right royal ride. Welcome to the rarefied world of cashless transactions. It is by now a well-worn cliché that our next-door dhobi or vegetable vendor transacts business digitally. Dystopian fancy conjures up images of women giving birth to babies, the mobile phone firmly in the clutches of the baby’s hand showing up first out of the womb followed by the parent body. ‘It’s an iPhone 15 Pro Max 256 GB,’ cries the proud father, as he hands out the customary celebratory cigars to his friends. Make that laddoos, if you are a non-smoker.

A brief aside. In the world of trading and commerce, the word cashback is intriguing. I am struck by the word cashback that has now become an integral part of our commercial lexicon. For reasons I have not been entirely able to fathom, the word discount has been cast into outer darkness. Totally discounted. The nobs tell us there is a subtle difference between the two terms, but I am still trying to get my head around it. The only plausible reason I can come up with for this change of terminology is that the word cashback sounds so much more alluring. It is only a mirage of course, but one gets the idea that the company is doling back cash to us every time we buy something. In a sense they do, but only after hiking up their recommended list price. And when we are not actually forking out hard currency from our wallets to pay but swiping plastic cards, or placing our mobiles in front of obliging QR codes, life seems to be a breeze. What you don’t know does not hurt you. Until you check your bank balance at the end of the month. Many people do not even do that. If they do, they flinch and quickly avert their eyes. ‘I couldn’t possibly have spent that much.’ Tell that to the Marines.

There is a deeper question to be addressed. Is the ease of transacting business through credit or debit cards, digital wallets, QR codes and in the case of larger amounts, NEFT / RTGS and so on goading us to spend more than we might normally have done? In other words, are we often buying things we do not really need? There’s a silly question for you during this silly season. Purely rhetorical, don’t bother answering. I know for a fact that every time I visit Amazon with something particular in mind to buy, other products slyly insinuate themselves and proffer attractive offers and you are that sucker that is born every minute, in the immortal words of P.T. Barnum. Rather like Eve in the Garden of Eden seductively reeling Adam in to bite into the apple, giving birth to the original sin.

‘Based on your recent buying patterns, we think you might be interested in these products.’ That is a dead giveaway. If you pay heed, on your head (or bank account) be it. A slew of items will stream in front of your eyes and before you can say ‘two for the price of one,’ you have just tapped a few keys on your mobile phone and bought four printing ink cartridges which you may not use for the next four months, by which time they would not be fit for purpose. Same day delivery of course, which is unfailingly the clincher. They call it bundling. I recently bought the redoubtable and feisty Congressman Mani Shankar Aiyar’s autobiographical peregrinations, Memoirs of a Maverick (the first of a trilogy, not clear if the other two are in the market or on the anvil), online from Amazon.  Just to avoid confusion, my searches revealed there are half a dozen other published books titled, ‘Memoirs of a Maverick,’ with slight variations. That said, they are all foreign mavericks, as opposed to our very own desi variant. For reasons best known to themselves, Aiyar’s book had been bundled with another title, Dethroned, by one John Zubrzycki. If I had not been sharp about it, I would have had two books for the price of two! What is more, I never buy books written by authors whose names I cannot pronounce, which rules out most Polish writers. However, each to his or her own. If you wish to try out Nobel Prize awardee Wislawa Szymborska, Henryk Sienkiewicz or Olga Tokarczuk for size, be my guest and have the time of your life. And mind you don’t get your tongue in a twist.

There you are. The wonders of free-form writing. Stream of consciousness, some may call it. Psychologist William James called it exactly that in 1893 and it stuck. For myself, I just meander, as the mood takes me. I started off talking about cashbacks and discounts and ended up quoting obscure psychologists. Obscure for me, that is. I am sure William James was the toast of his intellectual circle and a household name way back when. Particularly around the pubs in Warsaw. Had I run into the great man, which I could not have on account of my having been born 100 years later (give or take), I would have doffed my hat to him. Had I been wearing a hat that is, which I never have. Then again, should I have met him in some third dimension, having cast off my mortal coil, I would have probed him closely about cashbacks and discounts, to say nothing of UPIs, thereby hoping to stymie him. Chances are, the celebrated psychologist would have responded with some such nugget as, ‘A difference which makes no difference is no difference at all.’ Pithily put. In fact, that priceless gem has been attributed to William James, Esq. Somebody once said, ‘Procrastination is like a credit card: it’s a lot of fun until you get the bill.’ That pretty much sums up my thoughts on cashbacks and discounts.