Why large amounts of money are better understood in suitcases and trunks than in banks or numbers

Beyond a point the ordinary brain simply cannot process huge numbers. There are many apocryphal stories about committees that pass permissions for projects involving large amounts of money but quibble over smaller ones for sums that they can actually comprehend—say an airport versus a cycle stand. Many Indians, especially those in West Bengal must be similarly confounded by the mound of money recovered from the house of an actress with political connections.

Most reports say the pink and green-grey hillock in a corner of the room in the actress’s apartment adds up to over Rs 21 crore—an amount that most Indians will not have seen in physical form, not even those who have far more than that sum in their bank accounts, legally or illegally. So there is a natural morbid fascination for that pile, not unlike the way commuters gaze at the Ghazipur landfill and its circling scavenger birds when going from Delhi into Uttar Pradesh.

More from Opinion

Sergio Gor’s senate hearing signals the future of Indo-American ties How Trump’s ‘War on Drugs’ buildup against Venezuela has a hidden agenda

[caption id=“attachment_10954901” align=“alignnone” width=“640”]  Money recovered from the flat of Arpita Mukherjee, Bengal minister Partha Chatterjee’s aide, during the ED raids on Friday. Twitter/@dir_ed[/caption]

It is being said that had the Enforcement Directorate raid happened a day later the mound would have disappeared like an excavated hoard of Roman gold coins. Instead, millions of viewers have been treated to visuals usually seen in Richie Rich comics but even there the money was stacked in vaults, not carelessly heaped in a corner like trash. The haphazardness of the piles indicates sudden desperate urgency, not the cool calculatedness born of confidence!

Some may recall that in August 2015, a junior official in West Bengal’s Bally municipality was found to have done a far more diligent job of concealing almost exactly the same amount of ill-gotten money. A little over Rs 20 crore in Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes (Rs 2000 notes had not been launched or he could have stashed more in the same space!) plus gold and post office deposits were found hidden in around his modest suburban house including under the toilet and tiles.

Impact Shorts

More Shorts

How army remains Pakistan’s biggest business house

60 years on, why 1965 India–Pakistan war still matters

Even more curiously, over Rs 20 crore—suspected to be part of a multi-state illegal lottery racket— was also seized in a raid by income tax officials in Kolkata just a month later in 2015, hidden in almirahs and jute bags. Of course, that amount was found stashed in two locations, not in a single abode as in the first two cases, but it seems to imply that Rs 20 crore—give or take a few lakhs—is the magic number in West Bengal’s murky circles when hiding cash.

The November 2019 incident wherein Rs 100, 500 and 2,000 notes rained on passers-by from an office building in Bentinck Street, also in Kolkata seems paltry by comparison, That day pedestrians and vendors had got a windfall but it added up to a mere Rs 4 lakhs’ worth of notes. The cash was literally swept out of a sixth floor window just as a team of the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI) was conducting a raid on an suspect “import-export” company.

And the Rs 1 crore that ‘Big Bull’ Harshad Mehta had supposedly handed over to the then Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao in November 1991 has totally shrunk in shock value. At that time, though, the gigantic suitcase that he famously brandished at a 1992 press conference—the highest denomination at that time was only Rs 500—helped the bemused Indian public visualise that amount of money far better than gazing a long line of zeros after the number ‘1’.

Most brains do indeed find it hard to process large numbers, so it is not surprising that Mehta’s Rs 1-crore-in-a-suitcase allegation inspired many calculations of the space needed to accommodate that many notes, including plastic wrappers. Mehta had been exaggerating; the consensus is that the amount would have easily fitted into a medium sized suitcase and would have probably not even attracted excess baggage charges on a low cost airline—had they existed at the time.

Maybe even Mehta knew that: had he just shown a normal valise, the value of Rs 1 crore could not have been effectively communicated, and Rao may not have faced the amount of flak that he did. So the news that the ED brought in 20 trunks to cart off the cash found in the last week’s haul in Kolkata was a double whammy for the public, coming after photos revealed the actual volume of cash stashed in the house of the confidante of the now-arrested senior minister.

[caption id=“attachment_10955031” align=“alignnone” width=“640”]  Trunks from RBI arrive at the residence of Bengal minister Partha Chatterjee’s ‘close associate’, Arpita Mukherjee, to take away the seized Rs 21 crore. Twitter/ @pooja_news[/caption]

Cash containers are smaller and sturdier than the average trunks seen in trains, but even so, a crore and a bit in each one of 20 steel receptacles would convey the sheer quantity of money allegedly garnered as payment for getting people jobs in the state government’s education sector more vividly than stuffing notes into fewer cases for the sake of easier conveyance. And it puts a context-specific spin on the option usually seen in online buying platforms: Cash on Delivery.

The author is a freelance writer. Views expressed are personal.

Read all the Latest News , Trending News , Cricket News , Bollywood News , India News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.