₹100: From Childhood Fortune to One Chai and an Existential Crisis

There is a ₹100 note sitting in your wallet right now. It is not doing well. It arrived hoping to be useful — maybe buy something, contribute to society, feel like it mattered — and instead it is watching you debate whether to spend it on a cutting chai or save it for the autorickshaw minimum that now costs ₹110 anyway. This note has lived through things. And it is tired.

When ₹100 Was Your Whole Personality

If you grew up in the early 2000s, you remember The Moment. Dadi or Nana presses a crisp ₹100 note into your palm at some family function and for exactly 45 minutes you are the wealthiest person in your school district. You do the math in your head instantly, the way only children and portfolio managers can. Parle-G: ₹5. Phantom cigarette candy: ₹2. Full stationery haul plus a Natraj geometry box: ₹60. You still had change. You had options. You had, in a very real sense, power.

The local video game parlour charged ₹5 per game. ₹100 meant twenty games — a kingdom's worth of time on a rented PSP you handled like it was a transplant organ. You could treat a friend. You could be generous. You could perform the casual, devastating nonchalance of someone who does not need to count their money. At age nine, ₹100 was not just currency. It was a personality type.

The Current Price List of Your Shattered Dreams

Let us conduct a brief audit of what ₹100 actually purchases in 2025. One cutting chai at a café, which is defined as any room containing fairy lights and a Bluetooth speaker playing lo-fi beats. One vada pav in Mumbai if you are at a stall that still respects you; half a vada pav near a college that does not. A single metro ride, one way, in Delhi, with ₹12 remaining that will dissolve into your jeans before you reach the exit. An autorickshaw trip that technically costs ₹110 but the driver waves it off with the energy of someone granting you a small loan.

Alternatively: three-quarters of a samosa at a place that uses the word 'artisanal'. Forty-three seconds of parking in Bandra. The right to stand inside a mall food court while buying nothing and feeling judged. Two minutes of a stand-up comedian's set before they mention their therapist. One medium-sized onion, if the season is agreeable and the vegetable market is feeling philosophical.

Inflation is just vibes, said no economist who has ever tried to buy lunch in South Mumbai.

The Moral Crisis Is Not a Metaphor

Here is what they do not put in the RBI press releases: cost of living increases are not just financial, they are philosophical. Every time you hand over ₹100 for something your parents bought for ₹15, you are forced to reckon simultaneously with the passage of time, the failure of institutions, and the specific psychic cruelty of a chai that costs ₹80 and arrives in a cup too small to justify the emotional labour of having ordered it. You are not paying for chai. You are paying for the ambient grief of knowing this is the cheapest it will ever be again.

The data has been confirming this sadness with great consistency. India's retail inflation has spent the last decade doing its version of vigorous exercise — occasionally slowing down to appear busy, then sprinting the moment food prices remember they exist. The periodic vegetable crisis arrives like a recurring character in a show you did not sign up for: tomato at ₹200 per kilo, then onion, then some other vegetable that has never previously had opinions about its own value. It trends on Twitter, becomes a parliamentary debate, and then resolves into nothing. The RBI adjusts rates with the energy of someone rearranging deck chairs during a slow leak. You, standing at a tea stall holding a ₹100 note, are the net result of several intersecting monetary frameworks and none of them are sorry.

Who Did This (A Short, Incomplete, Non-Libelous List)

We are not going to name names. We are simply going to observe, as a neutral satirical party, that the leaders who suggested pakora-selling as a solution to unemployment now preside over an economy where pakora ingredients have tripled in price. We note, purely journalistically, that every five years someone promises to double farmers' incomes and every five years petrol quietly reaches a new personal best. We point out, without any agenda, that ₹100 in 2004 carried the purchasing power of approximately ₹350 today. Which means your money has lost two-thirds of its value and your parents have lost none of their confidence in The System.

• Global commodity prices — real, inconvenient, and extremely useful as a deflection
• Supply chain disruptions that were 'temporary' in 2021 and are now structurally load-bearing
• Fuel taxes that fund infrastructure you will see inaugurated in 2047
• The rent economy, where landlords mistake 'market rate' for 'what I feel like'
• The café economy, where someone decided 'artisanal' is a price point and we all nodded along

The TCJP Official Position on ₹100

The Cockroach Janta Party has studied this issue across several chai breaks and reached the following policy conclusions. First: ₹100 should be reclassified as a heritage object — like a functioning BEST bus or a rent-controlled apartment — something to be preserved and documented rather than spent. Second: any beverage costing more than ₹30 must by law arrive with either a snack or a written apology. Third: we demand the economics curriculum include a mandatory chapter titled 'What Your Parents Think ₹100 Is Worth vs. What It Actually Is', with a graph showing the two lines diverging around 2010 and never speaking to each other again.

Until these demands are met, we invite you to hold your ₹100 note up to the light, look at Gandhi's face, and ask yourself: would he have paid ₹85 for a matcha latte? The answer, much like this economy, is left as an exercise for the reader. The chai, somehow, remains worth it. That is either resilience or a coping mechanism. In this country, the two are the same thing.