Pace and creativity don’t gel, no matter how much you try to maintain your creative streak in the midst of the storms of life. Yeah, they could be perfect storms like the poets have. Mostly however, you’d end up with imperfect ones that require a lot of running around and anxiety and hope and confusion, and all of this makes hammering out anything beyond the immediate confines of your job, impossible.
The last few months have been a case study of such chaos. Things have taken too many turns, and all at the same time. But this post won’t discuss that, for such chaos deserves its own mantle. This post will discuss what it feels like to reach a station you desperately wanted to reach, after every train you wanted to catch from there, you’ve already boarded along the way. So when you alight from the final train and reach Redundant station, how do you feel ?
You’d probably feel you’ve wasted a lot of money, and would waste more getting a train back to where you actually need to be. Would you feel anything else ? Yes, if the scenario were a metaphor. Thankfully, it is.
You see, stations in life, in all their hierarchical and transportational glory, are defined by the system in which you live. One such system is called capitalism. If you’re not a diehard communist, nor a recluse, chances are that some of your most desired stations in life are shaped by what you understand of capitalism. For me, it has been an ability to add capital to the world economic system and draw from it, thus turning the “wheel” ever on and on. After all, what is capital but the condensed fruit of labour combined with existing capital ?
Now contributing to the capitalist system is something that is necessary, for without it you cannot draw your basic sustenance from the system. This is something I realised during my content writing days, when each page I wrote contributed a certain amount of money to my client’s pocket via Adwords or similar platforms. Or through commissions on websites like Seeking Alpha. Or through promotion of their own products and services. But never mind. The point is that contribution is something fundamental, as fundamental as drawing your wage from the system.
But capitalism would never survive if all we did was simply produce as much as would help us survive. That would be primitive socialism, not capitalism. Capitalism implies that man would follow his natural instinct to accumulate more and more, and in doing so, would create capital that could not immediately be given out as wages. This would stack up as savings, as rent to land and capital goods and as payments to organisation. What would be done with all this ? It would be invested, of course. Invested so more money could be made, increasing wages, yes, but most vitally creating opportunities for more capital to be made. The goal of the system becomes not sustenance, but profit and capital accumulation to not only keep the wheel turning, but ever widening.
Now if you look at investment, you will see that from the perspective of the investor, it is a risk of giving out something balanced with the hope that great returns would come of it. From the perspective of the recipient, it is a loan that contains an expression of faith in the person or firm’s ability to repay that confidence and capital through dividends. Looked at from the perspective of loans, are dividend payments that different from payment of interest on an actual loan ?
At one time, I’d hoped for such investment. No share-selling dividend-paying investments would I get. Instead, I would get the ability to turn short term loans into liquid credit with which I could buy services I needed to keep the content writing afloat and also expand it. Again, this could expand into the realm of frivolous spending, but then we all have our vices. What I wanted was for the capitalist system to repose enough faith in me so as to provide me with an investment or loan. One that I could use to create more capital, and thus become an integral part of the capitalist system.
In practical form, this meant getting a credit card. Credit cards provide you with a virtual purse every month, from which you can draw as much or as little as you like, provided you pay it all back at the end of the month. If you don’t, they begin charging interest. I could have paid it all back, I could have risked paying interest. I would not have defaulted. But would they trust me with the money entrusted to them ? Nope, they wouldn’t.
You see, there are some conditions of credit-worthiness. One was the per annum income. Usually, this has to exceed Rs. 2.5 lacs for consideration. Mine was close, and may even have exceeded the amount by a certain percentage during the heydays of my content writing. But then you need to prove it through tax returns. I had not filed my taxes at the time, so no go.
When I got a regular job, it turned out that my earnings from my regular job were actually lower than my content writing earnings. So while theoretically I could show salary slips instead of tax returns, the amounts per month would simply not qualify for a credit card. Again, no go.
Things changed only when I no longer needed credit to expand my content writing career. When I got a substantial post, I had to give up my “side-job” (because middle class Bengalis would prefer to theoretically respect poor and underpaid contractual lecturers than well-earning freelancers) due to the rules of the service. Yet the yearning remained. If I could not get a credit card as investment, I could use it to build a credit score and get loans with greater ease. I could get costly stuff on EMIs. Last but not least, I could purchase goods from any store in the world, and thus be a true part of the global capitalist system.
I began applying for credit cards using my now buffed up salary slips. Trouble was, even this wasn’t the last condition involved. As it turned out, companies giving out purses filled with others’ money for you to spend need to know not just what you earn, but also where and how you earn it. And they need to verify this from the point of residence and the point of work. This meant, in practical terms, home and office verification. Trouble was, my home was very much in a city but my office space was in “remote” Tehatta. To be fair, there is nothing particularly remote about the place, given that it is a sub-divisional headquarter and is well-connected to all major cities nearby (even Kolkata, if you manage to catch a certain state bus!) How do you explain this to the companies ? You can’t, and matters weren’t helped by the fact that my DDO gave out salary slips at three month intervals.
Hence, two applications to SBI, one to Kotak Mahindra, two to ICICI and one to Citibank failed. Once it was the location, then the salary slips, then both location and salary slips. I lost count of the number of times I had to go through the whole process of application and verification only to find myself in the credit card garbage bin.
Yet this process taught me two things. One was that there was no point giving addresses of “head offices” for govt. depts will simply ignore all credit card inquiries. Secondly, you have to persuade the people at the bank that location and location alone was the reason why you couldn’t get a credit card earlier. And give them some sops with which to get them to work. Because you know, MNCs work for the next big thing. Give them a sniff and they’ll fix whatever you’re currently aiming at. Tell them that this is the last thing you want, and their duties become hard-earned favours.
At one point, I decided that it was no longer worth applying endlessly with insufficient and unverifiable information (from their perspective). So I went in for what was called a secured credit card. Secured credit cards take the risk away from the bank by forcing you to dump a goodly amount of cash in the bank. If you fail to pay up your credit card dues, the company simply skims away the due amount from the deposit you have made. The silver lining is that the deposit is a fixed deposit, and earns interest at the normal FD rate. The ugly underbelly is that because the card is given out on lien against the FD, you can’t do anything with the FD itself. You get the card, but only if the money deposited is securely out of your reach.
I went in for this option and dumped the required amount in a private bank. Once given, they informed me that the credit card would take about two weeks to materialise. Two weeks later I was told that the amount was insufficient. They would have to open another FD with an additional amount. After this, nothing more was heard of the credit card plan.
The silver lining ? The bank offered something called the Platinum chip debit card. This apparently allowed for international transactions. So while I wasn’t able to borrow money, I could still transact on every website or terminal in the world. Even as my money gathered dust in the FDs (the debit card was against a savings account), I realised that another major component of the credit card world had fallen into my lap.
By this time, my first year of substantial service was nearing its end. Courtesy some helpful colleagues, I finally managed to get hold of three months’ salary slips. Armed with this and a mouthful of complaints about how people with out of the city workplaces were being discriminated against, I turned up at yet another private bank. The lessons I’d learned earlier did wonders. Explaining that I wouldn’t be able to invest in their this-or-that scheme until I got my credit card, I managed to link my credit card needs with their investment policy sales. They assured me that the workplace verification did have a workaround.
And it did. After two phone verification calls and one home verification, my application was approved and my credit card dispatched. After some unnecessary courier trouble (during which I managed to actually howl at a certain recalcitrant executive), I received the credit card.
Even as I decided that it would be the perfect replacement for my existing international debit card, however, it was revealed that major marketplaces had acclimatised themselves to the Indian payment system and were accepting all debit cards, net banking and in some cases, even cash on delivery! Not only was my credit card rendered redundant, even my international debit card was of little more use than the normal debit cards I had.
So when I did reach the station, what did I get ? The promise of a CIBIL score, for getting easier loans. The promise of EMIs, so I could get costly stuff with ease. But below all that, defying logic, was a sense of fulfilment at having finally become worthy of being entrusted with money belonging to someone else. I could finally get my own purse and spend it, thus drawing from the capitalist system in the second and most vital of ways. Long after the raison d’etat of having a credit card had been lost, I finally had a credit card to call my own.
Bemused and satisfied, I debarked at redundant station.