All around me I see people putting on their glasses, peering down straight line noses, looking at a crooked world, keeping track of what the Government had in mind for their rupee. This has become an annual feature. Around this time every year, the budget mongers take charge. And live in an imaginary world where their opinion is respected. They somehow manage to collect gullible enough audiences and waste a lot of time ranting and raving about some measure or other which doesn’t quite meet their innovative standards.

So when the ‘guaranteed’ black money curbing device is ignored, they curse. When the ‘fail proof’ poverty alleviator is dropped from the master plan, they curse more. And when that chaste line of income tax limit is breached, they curse even more.

A few of us spend these days actually putting in some work. Some doodle and dawdle and find themselves in a blog. Yet others walk the streets figuring out how life is going to be affected for them.

The first stop of course is the tea shop. The venue has been spruced up, the glasses have been given their ritual dunk into bucketfuls of dirt water and the backdrop cleared of all offensive material. After all, who knows, one of the TV Channels may pick up the Tea Stall as a discussion point and feature it live (oh what fun if my grandmother could see my stall…it would save her the trip and save me the bother).

So people congregate here a couple of hours before the budget hour and endless rounds of chai are ordered. Each round sees participants practicing the intellectual look (with or without imaginary cigarette) and each person works out his own variation of ‘err excuse me’…

But the benches are hard and the flies are irritants and so some of the smarter ones plan on a haircut. And ensconced on a barber’s chair is akin to being on a vantage point, maybe the helm of a ship called the economy or isn’t that what Socrates said to his hair stylist?

So the snip and tuck matches pace with the scissor action of the Minister and clauses make way for sub clause loop holes and sections create rifts in the fabric of society.

The air conditioned venues are predominantly business class. With lean back chairs and subservient waitresses. And they offer channelized music and aromatic boosters, plus spittoons with an old world charm. After all, pan chewing and spitting is still an elitist show of color.

But while the world ponders about the rise in taxes, the fall in values, the paucity of funds and the difficulties of debt one little boy asks the other – how much will a mirchi bajji cost.

And when the mirchi bajji seller’s son hears that it is for his friend’s little sister…he simply smiles, wraps up a couple of the bajjis in a piece of newspaper that headlines the budget, sprinkles some powders onto it…and gives it to our boy saying…give it to your sister, tell her it’s free for her…

the budget, in well oiled splendour is soon crumpled and crushed into waste paper oblivion. Perhaps next year we’ll actually see one that survives.