Do I Need to Know How Our National Currency is Behaving?
The Lari, our national currency, has been in circulation since 1991. Etymologically speaking, it meant ‘treasure’ in Old Georgian. What a glorious story – our symbol of well-being is associated with wealth and fortune.
Lari came to substitute the Ruble, the soviet medium of exchange – weird, isolated, unidentifiable and not exchangeable for any other currency in the world. The soviet socialist Ruble was a strange, but very stable guy: steady as a typical one-woman man. It did not depend on any global, regional or local economic vicissitudes. People trusted it and wanted to earn it without any desire, if not to promote some clandestine business, for the banks or resellers to trade it for the banknotes of other origin. Nobody worried how the Ruble behaved. Its value was taken absolutely for granted. We couldn’t care less whether it went up or down, or keeled left or right! It just filled a working man’s pocket according to his ability to work and based on his amount of labor.
The story with Lari is a horse of a totally different color. It came around as an attribute of the new capitalist epoch, as wild as it used to be at the twilight of the soviet land and at the dawn of the market era in the big country. It entered but it worked efficiently on and off, eliminating once in a while the hope of the selfsame working man for survival. The Lari has never stopped moving vertically in both directions and with scary amplitude exactly as it is doing right now, but I wonder if I need to know how it is behaving and why. Can’t I just earn and spend it at my own discretion without theorizing on its value every second, around the clock? I do not want to be watching with fear and broken fast-beating heart how the Lari is doing in the market. I just want to have my wallet thick with it, ready to listen to the wonderful tune of cash-machines ringing my goodies up with the help of my Lari – solvent, stable and full of purchase power. The tune I’m hearing on the radio and television every God-blessed minute these days are starting to get on my nerves and kill my desire to work for the weirdo Lari. That tune is holding me back from doing my main job, which is what I’m getting paid for. The amplified talk about the national currency is totally blocking my way to earn it and have it provide for my survival. Talk is not helping. Talk is hampering. Talk is obstructing the fruitful action which in reality has to be conducive to the ways of bettering our lifestyle.
I know that it all goes with the character of messy economic developments that countries suffer, but my involvement in that boosted talk is not changing anything. We all have our work to do, placed on our shoulders, and those shoulders can carry only so much, weakened even more on hearing all that talk about the currency ups and downs. Shoulders, too, have ears, and eyes for that matter. Shoulders feel that the burden gets heavier along with that much talk about the Lari, and someday the load might get so heavy that dropping the burden will become inevitable. God forbid!
I hate to be blind and deaf, but I am prepared to plug my ears not to hear again that talk – contradictory, fallacious, guessing, approximate, off-target and full of discrepancies. Let somebody utter just one serious, professional, solid word and have done with it. Let somebody say something that is trustworthy and close to the truth, if the truth is achievable at all, so that we the people know exactly where we stand and what we have to do in case our Lari continues shaking, which will shiver even more violently if the irrelevant talk that is taking place around and at all times persists.
I definitely need a break from that talk, even more than the stability of our financial martyr whose future seems so blurry and quizzical at this point in time.
Nugzar B. Ruhadze