$$$

Yesterday I went to the local D-Mart to buy some eye drops.  I handed over a one thousand rupee note to pay for the eye drops that cost Rs. 110.  The sales clerk takes a look at it and pushes it back to me and says "I can't take this note" and points to the ripped corner of the note, which I had not even noticed previously.  I am thinking to myself, "Can this guy be for real, but ok... fine."  I ask him what I should do with this slightly damaged 1000 rupee note, he tells me I have to go to the bank to exchange this for an undamaged note.  Annoying... yes, but, not totally ridiculous.  Mostly annoying because I don't carry very much cash on me or a credit card (since I don't really need very much cash on the daily), so I had to leave without my eye drops. 

This morning I asked my driver if he would go to the bank and exchange this damaged note for an undamaged one.  He calls me about 30 minutes after he dropped me off at work and says "The bank won't exchange it, they want the missing piece."  Un-fuckin-believable.  Do they think someone else is going to try to exchange the tiny missing corner for a new note?   I am so irritated by this.  Not that a wasted Rs. 1000, $21.60 USD, is an unrecoverable loss for me, but IT IS for some people here.  Like my driver, who went to the Bank to exchange this for me, he makes between 5000 Rs. and 10,000 Rs. a month, depending on how much overtime he works.  If he were to have withdrawn this very 1000 rupee note from an ATM that would have been A FIFTH of his income, POOF! GONE!, and there is nothing that he could have done about it.  How is someone supposed to recover from something like this?  

It's things like this that make me miss home, things that should be simple but aren't.  Running over to the drug store to buy eye drops should not be an ordeal that takes three days.  You come to appreciate how you can walk into any store back home and use a bill as long as you have at least a 2/3rds of it.  If its ripped completely in half you can just tape it together and go to the bank and get a new one, no questions asked.  

With this useless 1000 rupee note, I could have purchased the following:  
30 lunches at the canteen
200 tiny cups of black coffee from the canteen
4 movie tickets
2 redbull vodkas
50 loaves of bread
4 cans of lunch meat in a can
6 awesome watches off the street
20 cups of coffee from Cafe Coffee Day (The Starbucks of India)
83 Vada Pav sandwiches from Jumbo King
1 Marriott burger,fries and a diet coke from room service at the Renaissance (I know its ridiculously over priced)

 I know all this, because I have purchased all of the above while in Mumbai.