No need to smell a rat in money confetti

There are certain rats that have an affinity for cash; they have no use for cheques, online transfers, credit and debit cards and all other forms of money that technology has made available.

Nothing short of wads, neatly graded by denomination and nicely stacked for easy access. It is also not surprising that those rats prefer to interact with their cash in rooms, away from prying eyes, preferably in the dead of night. That some of these rats would actually OD on money, carried away by the sheer delight of being surrounded by piles of them, is also not entirely inconceivable. So, it is not surprising that members of genus Rattus rattus or their unrelated doppelgängers, Bandicota bengalensis (not Homo sapiens), got so overwhelmed by the sheer wealth of paper inside an ATM in Assam’s Tinsukia district that they shredded Rs 12 lakh worth of currency in roughly three weeks.

Of course, they may have done it out of necessity as the ATM had been out of order for that length of time and the rodents may have, therefore, been stuck inside the kiosk, unable to seek alternative forms of nourishment. There is really no reason to smell a rat even though a dead rodent was found among the piles of money confetti. Maybe this was just a belated murine way of taking forward the government’s demonetisation effort — or even surgical strikes.