India, Feb. 24 -- As a child, I was enamoured with the thought of carrying a wallet full of cash. But, growing up in a middle-class family in the '70s, both the money and the wallet seemed a distant dream.

My father had a bulky wallet which had worn out with the passage of time. It had lost its sheen and one couldn't make out whether it was originally brown or black. It was always bursting at the seams not because of the cash but due to a small phone diary and a large number of receipts besides the to-do list that he would stuff in the wallet. It used to protrude like a lump from his back pocket.

I was in Class 10 when my grandfather gifted me a wallet on my birthday. It was a rexine wallet with a photo of Zeenat Aman, a popular actress...