AFVOA Newsletter 03 of 2020

Section 5 - Memoirs CV 2 No. 03 / 2020 Page 94 of 167 the financial wizards guide you to investments that make you poorer even before the end of the day. Then there are study channels which can make you forget what you already know. Discourses on religion of every shade can leave you dispirited, and the only available recourse left within your reach is to quench your thirst during the evening hours to regain your spirits back, but not spirituality. I hear the rumbling that right now with no access to service canteens, the accumulated and unquenched thirst of almost four months is rendering every evening miserable to our veterans much to the chagrin of their better halves! At work, you get all the advice from the boss and many colleagues after you commit a blunder. Till then, they all wait patiently for your wrong move. The boss invariably mixes his advice with large doses of rebukes and warnings. In consequence, you rue all his rebukes and warnings, but miss his advice. Your colleagues, while relishing your discomfiture, sprinkle their words of wisdom diluted by their generous words of sympathy which sound more like condolences. When the going is rough and tough, you reach out to astrologers and priests for remedial advice. Though the stars and planets cannot be repositioned in your horoscope or in the sky, they can bepacified through sacred rituals and rites. The amount of propitiation to be undertaken is proportional to the budget you can afford. That (the budget that you can afford) is one thing astrologers never fail to predict exactly. Whether the stars and the planets turn you around for the better or you keep turning around the stars and the planets (‘navagraha’) in the temples is a subjective matter of one’s faith and belief. The final solace is found in the dictum of the divine will. In day to day life, the weather man advises relentlessly without looking for rewards. In the West, they take the local meteorologist seriously even if his forecasts go wrong. In India, everyone thinks that he can do much better than the weather man, and that too without his charts. In Kerala, no one ever stirs out of his home without an umbrella even when the moon shines brightly and the stars sparkle continuously in a sky with no trace of any cloud. In rest of the country, people prefer unexpected drenching to an umbrella. I do not think anyone gets more advice than the finance minister during the budget season – from a ‘dhabha’ owner to a five-star hotel manager, from a driver to an auto manufacturer, from a tailor to a textile merchant, from an elementary school teacher to a management guru, from a programmer to a multinational IT firm. With all that input (most of which is directly connected to the drain pipe) and with the ideals of equity and equality overflowing his/her heart, to fill the national coffers the finance minister submits a budget that taxes everyone and everything, and that taxes all income – past, present and future, save black money!