I arrived in Hyderabad at 2am in the morning. My usual MO when going abroad is to withdraw local currency from an ATM in the baggage claim area. I have found that, given the nominal bank fees from my US institutions, this gives me more bang for the buck than using currency exchange booths in airports that have high fees. Alas, the ATM was out of order. Having no Rupees, I resigned myself to using the currency booth exchange option. Oddly, it was closed. Given that nearly all international flights coming into Hyderabad arrive in wee hours of the morning, the office should have been open. Alarms should have gone off, but in my usual polyannish fashion, I chalked it up to karma/bad luck/strange circumstances and figured I could use an ATM in the arrival area.
Alas #2, all seven of the ATM’s in the arrival area were “out of order.” As a seasoned traveler, I admit with some embarrassment, that I still see anything significant about this . But I did begin to wonder how I was going to get from the airport to…well…anywhere without cash. Fortunately, the officially sanctioned taxi companies from the airport take credit cards. Otherwise, I would now be living there. Indefinitely.
India is one of the BRIC countries (or BRICK if you throw Korea into the mix–that is, South Korea, not the lunacy of the Northern iteration; or BRIIC/BRIICK if Indonesia is on your mind; or pluralize it with South Africa, as some do). These are the up-and-comers that everyone who is anyone in higher education and economics has been told to pay attention to as they re-imagine our current world order. These countries, more or less (and over the last 15 years it has mostly been less) will bid to compete for power on the global stage with their growing economies and commitments to modern technology. But, as it turns out, my situation was not just dumb luck. And it shed some light on the BRIC/BRICK/BRIICK/BRIIKS concept going forward.
My India experience was a result of “demonitisation,” which is intended to fight corruption (Venezuela has done something similar lately). The government eliminated the two largest currency denominations overnight in order to crush shady businessmen and crime syndicates who were surely keeping immense caches of these large currency bills under their business mattresses. Maybe this corruption-killing is happening (I have my doubts based on some revealing conversations with commodities “brokers” in the hotel where I stayed), but the more immediate effect on the street has been a rush by the non-shady elite and the middle-class to translate their large bills into smaller ones and to cash any recent pay-checks into smaller denominations asap. The result: a major shortage of the smaller bills. Translation: ATM’s have no cash. Banks have little usable currency–i.e. there are lines at the state bank that shame black Thursday sales at Best Buy… exponentially. If you are a tourist in the country right now, you are not going to get local currency, even at the best hotels.
Of course, there is a black market, but I would not suggest using it. Seriously, don’t do it. I thought about it and even tried it for two and a half minutes. You will not be treated well financially. You may not be treated well physically, depending on who you are dealing with. Just don’t do it if you are a tourist.
You may recall Samuel Huntington’s prediction that our world has been split into “civilizations” along cultural lines rather than moving towards a globally homogenous reality. At the end of 20th century, he received a lot of push back since many thought his pre-9/11 picture of Islam v. the West was overly confrontational (this is, of course, being re-thought in light of the last decade). Many thought he was helplessly naive about the merging of minds in a globalizing world.
But now, in fact and in retrospect, he seems to have been on to something in terms understanding America’s global role going forward, at least in terms of the future of Asia. India needs to be reckoned with as one of his “civilizations”, of course, in terms of absolute numbers of people in its borders, the movement of jobs (albeit low-tech jobs) into its economy and its regional influences. But this influence needs to be put into a larger context. The economic disparity between the “haves” and “haves-not” is of a scale that is unintelligible in the west. The understanding of “rights”is made on a different human calculus. The expectations for “good” government are defined in entirely different terms in D.C. than in Mumbai.