Manmohan & the power of intellect

On my 12th birthday, my parents decided I was old enough for pocket money. Two crisp five-rupee notes were deemed sufficient for a month's expenses—and they were. I clearly remember treating my friends to colas and burgers in the school canteen with just one of them, eliciting admiring cries of ‘whoa, big spender!’ from all present.

- ANUJA CHAUHAN

Perhaps, because we had no television, mobile phones, or video games back then, I spent a lot of time smoothening down and gloating over my pista green and pale-orange fivers. I dug the denseness of their texture. I found the curly whorliness of ‘five rupees’ written in all the Indian languages mysterious and romantic; the picture of a man tilling a tractor against a rising sun reminded me of my grandfather’s village in Haryana; the solemnity of ‘I promise to pay the bearer the sum of five rupees’ written in English and Hindi gave me actual goosebumps, and I loved the fact that making all this sound tremendously official and trustworthy was a neatly scrawled signature in dark ink—‘Manmohan Singh.’