Converting prices in a foreign country to the currency back home is so intuitive for travelers such that I almost feel like a walking calculator in an Indian supermarket. What’s interesting for me is that I have two currencies to convert to: the Indonesian rupiah and the American dollar.
An above average commute to ACM from a suburban Pune neighborhood is about 60 rupees, which is about a dollar and twenty-five cents or fifteen thousand Indonesian rupiahs – easily a very small when amount compared to $ 4.50, which is the cost of commuting to downtown DC from a Maryland suburb. Nonetheless, 60 rupees, $ 12.5, or Rp. 15 000 would buy you a satisfying lunch in Pune or in Jakarta, whereas a Quiznos sandwich would be set you back six times that amount of money.
A biking trip to Konkan on the southern coast of Maharashtra is about 600 rupees a day, or $ 15, which is fantastically cheap for an upper-middle class American family, but I found myself thinking about whether I should spend that amount or hypothetically feed an Indonesian family of three for an entire day!
I found it so funny to see how American students, at least in the beginning, are so pleasantly surprised by how cheap things are, yet, for me, it’s actually a little bit more expensive than business as usual.
Maybe it’s time to see the global economies in a post-colonial light – a third world upper-middle class family would need to save every penny to afford a modest lifestyle in the U.S., yet a typical suburban American family would find themselves a significantly elevated economic status in India.
Where did this gap come from? Is it a morally justifiable disparity?
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