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Welcome to the plastic world, ATM is your new God

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Valson Thampu
Valson ThampuDec 04, 2016 | 17:51

Welcome to the plastic world, ATM is your new God

Certain events are like thermometers. They help us gauge the temperature of the times.

A 52-year-old man stands in a queue at a Kolkata ATM booth. He begins to feel queasy. Huge beads of sweat break out from his scalp. They stream down his forehead, hit his pallid cheeks, and rain on the ground. His legs give way. He collapses in a heap.

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His fall creates a gap in the queue. His fellow Kolkatan right behind him steps up and closes the gap. The queue remains intact. It needs to be; for it is, after all, not any queue. It is an ATM queue. Who’d dare to step aside from such a queue, even if it is to check if a fellow human being is alive or dead?

It is a pretty ancient belief that you become like what you worship. This was, indeed, the logic of worship. To worship God is to become like God, or to imbibe the nature of God. As your God is, so you are. It is as simple as that.

Our current god is the ATM, or Automatic Teller Machine. It is coldly functional. It dispenses money. But what does it have to do with emotions or small things like heart attacks and premature deaths? You go to an ATM with a card, not with compassion.

You leave your compassion at home. It is heavy baggage, you see. You have to stand for long. And no one goes on a long and tedious journey laden with superfluous baggage.

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Long periods of exposure to an ATM make you an AQM, or Automatic Queuing Machine. Then the only relevant thing about you is that, for you the queue is everything. It is the only reality. The queue is your de facto temple. Standing patiently in fear and hope, without as much as a murmur, is your prayer, your sadhana. You persevere in this prayer. After a long while, you could be rewarded. Who knows?

Finally you reach the ATM itself! Your luck holds. The ATM responds to you! You walk out, in a sort of digital bliss, clutching a crisp, 2,000-rupee note!

All that became possible only because you kept your place in the queue for dear life. A queue has its own logic, its own magic. This keeps you under a spell. You dare not compromise the syntax of a queue, for the sake of one whose connection with the ATM is demonetised: the man lying beside the queue, dying. That is the reality: he who falls away from the ATM is dead for all practical purposes.

So the victim of the ATM queue in Kolkata lay dying for 20 minutes, while the queue, like an army of disciplined ants, crept along. The man died. Died alone; alone, alone, all, all alone, alone at the doorstep of a gleaming, blinking ATM. 

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There is nothing strange about it. The event has impeccable logic and contextual consistency. If there is anything strange, it is that some media reporters are shocked! How can you stand, like a cold block of flint, and watch a fellow human being (actually you are watching only the heels of the man in front and measuring his progress in millimetres with your mind’s eye) die right beside your elbow?

Well, you don’t know? Here is why.

atm-ebed_120416053649.jpg
Think of swiping your credit card on a machine held out by a starving street girl! That says it all. (Photo: India Today)

In the last nearly one month, have you heard words like love, compassion, humanity, help, sensitivity, heart, pain and so on? I haven’t. All I have heard is cash, cashless, black money, plastic money, digital wallet, legal tender and so on.

My ears and mind are plugged with this sort of stuff. Till a month ago, I thought life was more than cash. Cashew nuts, for example? I thought life was a little more than "plastic money". Natural honey, for example? A trifle more than "legal tender". Human blunder, for example?

Now, in my walk, in my talk, in my sleep, it is only money, money, money/must be funny, in the rich man’s world. My familiar human community has crashed and contracted into a cashless society.

I am sure you see the point. You create a world in which money alone matters. Money is worshipped. Then you pretend to be shocked that human hearts become stones, incapable of fellow feeling.

The curse of modern culture is that means have become more important than goals. Money was never the goal. It was only the means - that too, one of the many means - for living. Living with meaning and dignity was the goal. Now, almost over-night, money is the only goal. Human beings have become the means. So, money, not your life, matters. I’ll walk over your corpse to reach my ATM and think myself smart too.

Over 80 citizens have perished at ATM queues. You mention this, and a tonne of bricks falls on your head. “Don’t politicise deaths", a hundred mouths scream at you. It is okay to occasion (I don’t say "cause") deaths. It is a crime to mention them.

I don’t know which is worse: this callous roar denouncing references to demonetisation-related deaths, or your reluctance and mine to forgo our places in ATM-queues to help a dying fellow human being who, like us, came there just to get his hands on a small piece of his own cash.

Make no doubt about this one. This event is a foretaste of the times to come. Cash carried a flavour of the old world; a world in which we felt for each other, shared a cup of tea on and off at a way-side dhaba, lent or borrowed a few bucks now and then in the face of need, and flung a few coins towards famished children begging on the streets.

All of these will be like the Kolkata man vis-à-vis plastic money. Suddenly, all of that have vanished from the radar of your life. Think of swiping your credit card on a machine held out by a starving street girl! That says it all.

So get ready. Your turn, my turn, could come sooner than expected. It’s no fun dying alone, on a street, even in a cashless, plastic world. What blunts the sting of death is the touch of the human hand.

As you cross the narrow strait from this world to the next, from our proud digital world to a humbling world of unmanning mystery, plastics melt and digital wallets burn, leaving behind only rock-like human hearts too hard for tears to melt or fires to burn.

You heap them together on the streets. They will rattle against each other. Prick your ears. You would hear them say, “welcome to the plastic world”!

Last updated: December 05, 2016 | 13:15
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