Where are the small pleasures?

Happy new year,o ye faithful (and few?) reader-friends!

Journo school is back to it's mad pace after my two-week long vacation back at home,where I did nothing except make trips to Kerala nearby and other places of interest in and around Coimbatore.

Coming back to Chennai was a drag.God,just coming back to the apartment and feeling the mad rush of the traffic hit my eardrums again.Felt like that familiar but necessary nightmare again.
It was somewhat comforting to see my fellow amateur-journalists at college,cursing the newly formatted computers in the lab and complaining about P.Sainath(Yes,Rural Affairs Editor,The Hindu) and his theatrical lectures on poor people.
I have even started a new diary.Pen,paper and all.Because,somehow I feel that this blog's become more of an impersonal journal.At times it feels like that,atleast.So,all the juice is in that leather bound diary:D

And,life is resuming normalcy.Well,almost.

I was on the bus yesterday and the conductor owed me some 50 paisa change.And,every time I asked him for it,he'd mysteriously not have one.But other people got their 50 paisa back.I asked him twice.Then I got so busy thinking about the 50 paisa coin itself,that I forgot to collect my change in the end.

About a couple of years back,a 5 rupee coin was a rarity.It was this cute,fat,ridged round thing the weight of which you could distinctly feel in your hands.And then,almost overnight,they became ubiquitous,and as we all know it,if one guy gets popular,he's edging someone out.So,the twenty-five paisa coin slowly started becoming less and less common.The ten paisa coin had already disappeared then.

The reason I'm saying all this is because,slowly,even the fifty paisa coin seems to have no value too.The conductor didn't seem to think that a well-off person needed that fifty paisa coin anyway.And,I dispensed with it very readily too.Didn't really mind losing it.In fact,it seemed to even out my accounts.

But the value of every unit of money,and I am saying this on a general level,not as an economic theory,is falling.
The 50 paisa no longer buys what it did a while back.If you're lucky you would be able to xerox one side of paper using that,or buy a small Mentos(the mouth freshener :D ) with it.The exoticism of holding and clanging small metal round things weighing like a feather and feeling like Midas are all gone.

When I read R.K Narayan's novels,or listen to my mother's tales of how they bought treasures with one or two rupees,I am fascinated.The little copper anna(I hope I got that right!),which I am ashamed to say I've never seen lost the battle.So did the ten,twenty,and the twenty five paisa(to some extent).Very soon the 50 paisa will become obsolete.

As the units of money become higher and higher,they will buy fewer things.And fewer treasures that little children can eye greedily at small tea shops.

Instead,little girls and boys today glance hungrily at the colourful and conceitedly high priced packets of Lays and Kurkure on stands.That is,if their parents deign to get off their a/c cars and step onto the dusty and non- existent sidewalks.

Sigh.The small pleasures of life.I build my life around those.No wonder I take a beating many a time.

Guh,no "self-flagellation":-)

ps:I've been buying kilo upon kilo of "ber"(Hindi) a.k.a "elandapazham"(Tamil) at the bus-stand.Apparently,this is the season.Still have no idea what they are called in English,but they are sweet and tangy.Slurp.