Money seems to have lost its shock value. Even in a country where 80% of the population lives on less than $2 or Rs 95 a day as per World Bank estimates. Else, why wouldn’t anybody be surprised over the Rs 9 lakh (some papers reported Rs 2 lakh) that the Nagaland home minister Imkong L Imchen was reportedly found carrying in a suitcase at Kathmandu airport? The media duly reported that the minister was briefly detained because he was carrying currency notes in denominations of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 and that he was released after he explained that he was simply not aware that Indian notes of these denominations were banned in Nepal. But nobody appears to have been even mildly curious over the amount of cash that the minister was found carrying while returning from a four-day private trip. 

Of course, there may be a perfectly rational explanation in this case. We know, for instance, that Indian banks advise against using debit and credit cards in Nepal. So the minister may have been forced to carry all this cash and more since this was the amount found on him while he was about to take his return flight. It is also possible that the minister may not have known about the ban on Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 Indian notes in Nepal. But why didn’t anybody raise their eyebrows over the fact that somebody could be carrying Rs 9 lakh or even Rs 2 lakh in cash just like that?

Is it because money has got so devalued over time? No, that couldn’t possibly be the case because a majority of Indians continues to aspire to earn the mandated minimum wage for a skilled labourer, all of Rs 248 for an eight-hour workday in Delhi, which is denied to most workers in the unorganised sector.

Is it, then, because of growing corruption in high places involving increasingly larger sums of money? Even in the early 1990s, when the stock market trader Harshad Mehta claimed that he had paid Rs 1 crore in cash to the personal secretary of the then prime minister PV Narasimha Rao, people at large felt a bit let down by the modest sum. Not surprisingly, perhaps, because just a few years earlier, then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi had come under a cloud for 64 times that amount. The second half of the 1990s set a much higher benchmark when Bihar chief minister Lalu Prasad figured in a Rs 950 crore fodder scam. And now, of course, with Union telecom minister being repeatedly accused by the opposition parties of a 2G spectrum auction scam of anywhere between Rs 20,000 crore and Rs 1 lakh crore, the threshold has climbed much higher.

The home minister of a state of this country does not even bother to explain why he was carrying so much cash. He could be fighting hard in his own state to deal with the humungous problem of counterfeit currency, of the same denominations as he was carrying, flooding our economy, wait, wait, was that not the reason we leaned on Nepal to ban the notes in the first place?  Yet, the minister mumbles nonsense about not knowing the Nepal law (you really worry if he knows that is part of his job back home) and he is let off without explanation. It could all be perfectly legitimate cash, but there were times once upon, when a minister would have turned pink trying to explain this way because there would have been many more inconvenient questions asked.

It does seem that one of the weird aspects of "development" is the constant recalibration of our own shock meters. Unless each scam is bigger than the previous one we have no interest in it: ah, well, we've seen much worse, haven't we? Thus even as the aam aadmi or common man struggles to eke out a living, it is perhaps natural to get desensitised to somebody else’s money that defies comprehension in any case. The Nagaland home minister may well have carried several times the amount without anybody popping the once-natural question: But minister, minister, why were you carrying so much cash?