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| Keya Sarkar: No access banking |
| Keya Sarkar / New Delhi May 23, 2009, 00:52 IST |
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When I had first arrived in Santiniketan, it had taken me quite a while to open a bank account. Primarily, because I had no papers to prove my locus-standi. But thanks to a very kind manager of the United Bank of India, I managed to open an account with them.
After many years I went back to the practice of standing in queue in front of a teller to withdraw or deposit money. Although after years of anytime banking, initially keeping to bank timings and wasting time in line irritated me, I soon managed to find entertainment in the old world ambience of tokens and number displays to announce one’s turn at the teller.
However, one day as I presented my cheque to withdraw money, the teller seemed to push many tabs on his computer, stared at the screen for a long time and then told me that he could not pay because my cheque number didn’t show as being one issued by the bank. Although I was bewildered the first time I decided I should have more patience with non-urban systems and continued banking with them. But when the same thing happened several times I knew the time had come for me to divorce my friendly neighbourhood bank.
Luckily for me it was at the same time that I got an invitation from P J Nayak inviting me for the opening of the then UTI Bank’s Santiniketan branch. I was impressed that the chairman was actually putting in an appearance for a branch with not much potential for business, but I put it down to the brand that is Santiniketan rather than the potential it has. The ATM machine at the entrance, the gleaming interiors, the familiar office furniture, and the smart clothes of the employees all gave me a feeling of being back in my comfort zone of banking as I knew it. Needless to say I switched loyalties and went back to old ways of relating only to the ATM machine.
Over the years as UTI bank turned into Axis bank and thereafter, I began to notice changes. Initially it was the visitors’ sofa which wasn’t as sprung as earlier, then the demeanour of the staff (a larger proportion hanging around rather than at their desks) and then more and more a general air of indifference with the gleaming floors remaining increasingly unswept, files and boxes getting piled up in corners. And I wondered why is it that all efficient places in Bengal strive towards the lowest common denominator in that sector rather than the other way round.
Recently I had sent a cheque to somebody and after a few days I got a text from Axis bank saying that the cheque had been returned and I should contact my branch for details. I went to the branch the next day to enquire. The gentlemen I approached took a little while to understand (after reading the sms message) whether the cheque had been issued by me or to me. Once he appreciated the problem, he stared at the computer for a while, and finally told me that the “system was not throwing up anything” but assured me that it was “not my fault as I had adequate balance”.
So why send a text then? If I had to wait for the recipient of the cheque to tell me what the deficiency was, why ask me to visit the branch? Is there something I am missing here?
As I waited on the unsprung sofa to finish some other work at the branch I could not help but notice how the branch was functioning. In the midst of a general slothfulness, men and women would emerge from behind their computers to ask loudly across the banking hall to their colleagues, in Bengali “system aache?”
I presumed they were referring to the computer system which must have been down, but after hearing this a few times I could not but involuntarily say from my seat “Na nei”.
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