Newsroom Humor: In Search Of The Dollar!

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Even as the busy professionals of the local news channel get about making feature/interview stories on the nosediving Indian rupee against the US dollar in their inner minds they get perturbed too. They get the bytes of experts disturbing them further that the freefall is likely to continue for months and it would cross even the 80 rupees per dollar mark. Their meager salaries too threaten to mire them in the devaluation sludge.

Schemes for the poor like the Food Security Bill that promises to make staple grains available at 1-2-3 rupees per kilo bring out the contrast of the devaluation. They wonder aloud as the amused editor takes note:
“My goodness! See what just a single dollar can buy now in India! 68 kilos of coarse grains, 34 kilos of wheat and nearly 23 kilos of rice (at current rupee-dollar rate)!”
“Right! I have one solution. Pay salaries to all of us Indians in terms of dollars! Then you won’t need to implement any pro-poor schemes or programs ever.”

Of course, they laugh away the incredibility of the whole thing. Some other brainy buddies suggest other options as the amused editor looks on:
“High time we leave India!”
“Where? America? You are hardly welcome there nowadays, pal!”
“Well, we can still choose other countries where they pay you in dollars. And we must settle there. See, you go to study there your costs increase now by nearly 30 percent.”
“Okay…let us discuss this with our elders and parents. Maybe something acceptable emerges out!”

Of course, they grin away the impracticality of the whole thing. However, they get some news immediately that only corroborates their mutual consternation. A 68-year-old lonely Indian settled in the USA wants to get married and gives out matrimonial ads hoping to find a few applications from maybe 45+ or 50+ Indian ladies. But whoa! He gets more than 150 applications and counting that include even young girls in their twenties.

In view of the dollar-psychosis threatening to go viral it would be in America’s national interests to do something positive from their side too to boost the value of the hapless rupee or else face the biggest exodus of the Indian kind of the millennium!   

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