Cheques and balances
Some of us will miss that piece of paper
It was a small rectangle of paper, perhaps six inches by three. I gazed at it with reverence due to a priceless work of art.
It wasn’t a work of art, but for me it was priceless. It was the first cheque I’d ever received, for the princely sum of ₹300, which was my first month’s salary as a feature writer for the Junior Statesman, the youth magazine that The Statesman newspaper was launching.
The avuncular Company Secretary, PT Dastoor, took me to Accounts Department, where a Chatterjee Babu guided me through the intricacies of opening a bank account and obtaining a cheque book of my own.
That cheque was a milestone in the journey of my life, representing transition from feckless youth to gainfully employed adult.
I recalled my first cheque, and the transformative impression it made on me, when I read a recent press report that cheques as instruments of commercial negotiation are being phased out by more up-to-date forms of give and take, such as credit and debit cards, digital payment platforms, and bank transfers.
An endangered species, cheques now generally provide photo ops when outsized examples of them, denoting very large amounts, are ceremoniously handed over for commercial or charitable purposes.
The increasing disappearance of cheques in relation to bank balances has its advantages, mainly those of transactional rapidity.
Cheques could involve time-consuming procedures, particularly when withdrawing money. You handed the cheque to a cashier who gave you a numbered brass token that you clutched in your hand while waiting for your number to be called, doing time-pass chitchat with fellow waitees, also holding brass tokens. Instant-use ATMs have replaced brass tokens, but aren’t given to time-pass chitchat.
Cheques have a chequered history that now draws to a close, and have been part and parcel of our own annals, our personal rites of passage. And, in hindsight, I wonder if that first cheque of mine was perhaps not a work of art, but at least a piece of memorabilia worthy of being framed and put on the wall as a portrait of the writer as a newfound man.
Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
