On The Money

The currency bomb has been dropped. And we can’t stop talking about it. The believers seem to think that the Darth Vaders of black money have been caught with their masks down and the giant money laundering machine has been short circuited. While the doubters view it as an apocalyptic event engineered by Narendra Bin Thuglaq that has unleashed more pain than a tsunami, earthquake or famine.

Obviously the truth lies somewhere in between. We’ll know the real results not in 50 days, but may be in 50 weeks when people on both sides grow a brain and see things as they are. Till then, all we can do is to queue up for change and improve our knowledge of money. A baby step in that direction is to figure out why a rupee is called a rupee and a dollar, a dollar.

A good way to make a start is by browsing dusty history books and musty dictionaries. From what little I’ve gathered, the original precious metal in which the currency was minted, played a big role in the naming.

When the great Afghan Sher Shah Suri lorded over Delhi between 1540 and 1545 AD, he used three metals to serve as instruments of exchange. The Gold coins were called ‘Mohur’, the Silver coins were the ‘Rupiya’ and the Copper ones were deemed as ‘Dam’. Incidentally, the phrase ‘I don’t give a damn’ may have its roots in the tiny copper coin. For those who know their languages, Rupiya is derived from ‘Raupya’, the Sanskrit word for ‘Silver’ and Mohar in Persian means ‘seal’.

Even the Dollar’s story has a silver lining. It all began in 1520, when Bohemia minted coins from silver mined in St. Joachim’s Valley or ‘Joachimsthal’. The coins were referred to as Joachimsthaler or ‘thaler’ for short. With passage of time, the ‘thaler’ became the ‘dollar’. Another currency with a silver connection is the Russian rouble. ‘Rouble’ literally means ‘to chop’ and it’s probably derived from the practice of chopping silver bars to create transactable money.

The moolah from some other countries have interesting etymologies: the Polish zloty translates to ‘golden’; the Japanese yen is from the Chinese ‘yuan’ which implies ‘round object’; the Arabic ‘riyal’ is from the Spanish word for ‘royal’; the Chinese renminbi decodes to ‘people’s currency’; the Scandinavian krone is from the Latin ‘Corona’ (crown); and the euro (the short form of Europe) was coined by a Belgian named Germain Pirlot in 1995. That was my two cents on money. Hope you’ll spend it wisely.

Two cents on currencies.

Elizabeth Taylor summed it up best when she quipped: “Money is the best deodorant.” In these times of bizarre bailouts that feels ‘right on the money’ as the stench of bankruptcy that surrounds Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Spain and Portugal can only be overpowered by a liberal squirt of Euros or the enchanting odour of crisp greenbacks cranked out by Ben Bernanke and the Fumbling Feds.

A deep discussion on the economics of recession always puts people to sleep so I shall stick to the superficial and serve you the trivial stuff you’ve always craved for.

Let’s set the ball rolling by understanding why the rupee is called the Rupee. Before Sher Shah Suri came along and applied the Sanskrit word for ‘shapely’ (what Rupiya means) to silver coins, the tankha (yes, the Hindi word for salary!) was the fiat currency of the Thuglaqs. Babar and Humayun somehow didn’t fancy the Rupiya. They preferred the Shahrukhi instead.

Akbar deserves the credit for putting the Rupee back into circulation as he felt it had its merits. The rest of the Mughals just cut, copy, paste Akbar’s template and that’s how India was flooded with many variants of the Rupee. The East India Company standardised the currency system by subsuming the local denominations.

For example, in the Madras Presidency, the basic unit was the copper Kasu. Then there was the silver Panam (80 copper kasus). Followed by the Rupee (12 panams) and on top there was the gold Pagoda (3.5 rupees). Over time, this was simplified into Pice, Paise, Annas and Rupees. 16 Annas, 64 Paise and 164 Pies were the equivalent of one rupee. Now you know the real import of the legendary Bollywood dialogue ‘pie pie chuka doonga’!

The Yuan and Yen have similar origins to the Rupee. As in, they cue the round shape. Pound comes from Latin word ‘Poundus’ indicating weight. While ‘Dollar’ is derived from Thaler, short for Joahimsthaler, a coin made from metal mined in Joahimsthal, a town in Czech Republic. And ‘Dirham’ owes its origins to the Greek word Drachma meaning ‘handful’. Hope the dime-a-dozen trivia you just learnt was worth every penny!