Last week, I was accosted by two young girls while shopping in a supermarket. Shopping for groceries is serious business for me, since I forget to make a list of things I need to buy. So I have to stand in front of the racks, look hard at the products on display, close my eyes and think of my kitchen and bathroom shelves — and all this before I can get down to comparing prices and discounts. Being disturbed at this moment of utmost concentration is not nice at all. But the girls were full of smiling tenacity, so I thought I’d hear what they had to say.

They were offering me a credit card.

I used to possess two credit cards, but I — preferring to identify myself with the have-nots rather than the haves — decided I had no use for them, and gave them up. Ever since, I have been woken up every other day by some bank or another offering me a credit card. They come in more or less the same shape and size, but with the most amazing variety of freebies. Maybe if they hadn’t disturbed my precious morning sleep, I would have entertained the calls. But I must admit that having resisted the temptation of joining the “only plastic money” club made me feel quite virtuous.

And then, I had to get flight tickets in a hurry, and booking on the net seemed the easiest option. Whatever virtue I may have earned went out of my office window when I realized that the task was impossible without a credit card. Thankfully, a number of colleagues were willing to help with theirs.

That was when I embarked on the noble mission of getting myself a credit card. It should have been easy, given the deluge of calls I was receiving. (Although it is both frightening and objectionable that all the potential credit-card givers should have my number without my giving them.) But then the ugly truths started coming out.

The ugliest of them all: journalists have one of the lowest credit ratings, though no bank has cared to explain to me the mathematics of this so far. Not that all journalists are refused credit cards — in fact, most of them possess one or more. Which makes it all the more annoying to receive letters, from nationalized and multinational banks alike, rejecting my application, with the proud boast that “the bank is not liable to provide an explanation for the refusal”. To think that I had to spend whole mornings looking for my PAN card, voter’s ID, last salary slip (in my zeal to be ‘organized’, I never can find the documents when I need them), and then photocopying them — once for each bank that said would give me a card!

I discovered, however, that I was not alone in my travails. A senior colleague once had a bank representative going away from his doorstep, without delivering the card, once he learnt that the recipient worked for a newspaper. Another was refused a personal loan for the same crime.

Are the banks afraid that journalists might default on their payments, and then threaten to ‘expose’ the banks if the penalties were not waived? Do the banks really have so many skeletons hidden in their lockers?

The smiling girls at the supermarket did not realize that they were after the wrong person. Maybe I should stop flying or keep ‘banking’ on my friends’ credit cards?