Re Design

Still,that’s how successful symbols evolve — in mystery. £ and ¥ have similar histories. Which lends to the Indian finance ministry’s announcement that the princely sum of 2.5 lakh will go to the designer of a rupee symbol a touch of strangeness. Yes,it’s true that ,the euro’s symbol,was born of a competition — but,in the end,it was incredibly predictable: from the initial “e” and two horizontal lines “for stability” — a hopeful indicator common to several currency symbols. A similar combination won the Ukrainian contest. The strangeness doesn’t decrease when the actual competition rules are read: the symbol must “represent the historical and cultural ethos of the country as widely accepted across the country”,a tall order for something that is,basically,a single modified letter. Oh,and it should be in “the Indian National Language Script,” whichever that might be.

The fear is that this might degenerate into farce. Consider Russia’s decade-long search for a symbol for the rouble,which featured various unofficial symbols and a decision to test-drive thirteen different variations. (Cynics might claim that the main reason for this confusion was that they couldn’t decide whether the first letter of the word “rouble” should be in Cyrillic or Roman script before they put the Double Bars of Stability through it.) All moot,anyway perhaps: the ultimate authority,Microsoft Word,already lists “unicode decimal 8360” — an “R” and a “p” joined together,as they were on old Indian-made typewriters — as the rupee symbol. What’s a government competition compared to that?