In 2011, I wrote a short
piece on our currency, titled Ngultrum Identity, wherein I have said that the
existing symbol of our currency Ngultrum (དངུལ་ཀྲམ་) which is kept as ‘Nu’ could not be taken as our
currency symbol because it could be written only in English.
Four years have passed
since, but my article can be read like it was written this morning because no
development has taken place. We still don’t have a symbol for Ngultrum in a
real sense, though it has the ISO 4217 code since its appearance in 1974 that
is BTN.
It’s fairly ok to use
abbreviation like Nu in countries where English is the national language but
for us we have Dzongkha, which we are proud of and using an English
abbreviation seems like disregarding our own language. For that matter using a
Dzongkha word can also be inconvenient as much of our written works are done in
English.
Therefore, it is a
conventional requirement for an independent state to have a graphical symbol to
denote its national currency. It may seem like a small thing but it’s a status
symbol of a nation. It’s like any other symbol that defines our identity as a
nation state. It’s not something we should be taking for granted. We should not
be so complacent to live with an easy Nu.
Ever since my first
article on the subject I have been on a personal mission to create a symbol
myself. I have played around with traditional signs, combined letters in
Dzongkha, crossbred letters in Dzongkha with English and explored Ranjana
script but the more I tried the more complicated my symbols became. I then
realized how complex it was to create simple thing.
It was after a long
gap that I resumed my mission and recently I found something I was satisfied
with. I am sharing it here hoping to find people who could refine it and make
it creditable enough to be submitted for consideration to The Royal Monetary
Authority. And I found out that for a
currency symbol to be implemented it requires the adoption of new Unicode and
type formats, which means a computer geeks could help too.
 |
| Ngultrum Symbol |
I have taken the 'ངུ' from between 'དངུལ' and changed the direction of the tail a little
bit to give it a sense of completeness.
Inspiration: India got its currency symbol ₹ through an open competition in 2010. The designer D. Udaya Kumar used a combination of Devanagari letter “र” (ra) and the Latin capital letter “R”.
