Budgets don’t trouble me because I am the world’s 1075th richest man. Do the math. In a human population of over 7 billion people sharing this planet with animals and plants who are yet to discover the monetary and economic system, I am, by pure percentage of declared wealth alone, richer than 99.9 per cent of humanity (Yes, feel jealous). Wherefore must I be finicky about Mr Pranab Mukherjee’s 2012 Budget?
Unless video games get cheaper, bottles of single malt scotch too, I prefer to watch cartoons on Nickelodeon, Pogo and Cartoon Network as opposed to the singles of tens of hundreds of thousands of millions of billions of trillions of quadrillions of countless infinite economic experts, analysts and perspective givers who will show up on ‘Budget Day’ on my TV screen.
Now, for these dudes and dudettes, the annual budget presentation is nothing short of the Cricket World Cup. Or a grand epic Mahabharata of growth versus inflation. And like Rocky Balboa in those boxing films, they prepare all-year-long just for this. The TV panelists strengthen their fingers with the most knuckle-crunching finger exercises because nothing makes a budget more riveting than an economic panelist pointing his finger at the camera in the TV studio. These athletes need to be in shape, both physically and mentally. All year long, they eat only Chyawanprash so that on the day of the budget, their minds are sharper than a samurai sword.
They will talk, yell, scrutinise and criticise, examine, re-examine and de-examine, they will bare their souls. They are the ones we depend on to simplify our understanding of the biggest event in the history of the Indian economy and each year, the show simply gets better! The number of professors in the cosmic television battleground swells every year because the sport of economic debate gets more and more competitive every year. It is a brutal sport, only the strongest will survive—but these people can handle it.
You could trivialise the budget and ask questions like, “Will the budget increase my salary?”; “Will farmers stop killing themselves because of the budget?”; “Will it reduce the price of fuel?”; “Will it stop scams and corruption and prove that the Indian banking sector is stronger than the Swiss banking sector?”. Heck, you could even ask your bottomline question, “Will the budget make stuff cheaper for me, period?”
But if you did so, you would be missing the whole point. You’d instead be acting like a buzz-kill, a party pooper, a ridiculous mood-spoiling troglodyte, a stupid idiot who does not understand how awesome the budget is. Now, why would you want to be all of the above? Just watch the show instead. It only comes once every year and the economic warriors totally kick ass! THE BUDGET ROCKS!
Read Fake Jhunjhunwala’s parody blog at http://www.rakeshjhunjhunwala.in/
