Staying away from home in an eleven hours lagging behind time zone is like your ass is on fire for last several hours and only after eleventh hour you start feeling the heat. you are left with no choice but to see how much damage happened already.
Same feeling this morning. while i was in sound sleep, our beloved finance minister aka defense minister aka second most popular leader of Bhartiya Janta Party (at that time Mr. Amit Shah did not cross my mind) who somehow, like a miracle, had managed to lose election at a time when whole country was painted in whatever color Gujrat is painted, has already finished with his National Democratic Alliance's second manifesto aka union budget of India.
Curious as hell, i opened three tabs of 'The Hindu' 'Facebook' and 'Twitter', there was nothing on Facebook, shocking, but that also means budget has not offered anything which will add a feather in the cap of the image of Mr. Narendra Modi ji. It was beyond imagination that something good was offered or i should say promised and it was not hyped on Facebook from his innumerable supporters.
'The Hindu' article on budget was all which i needed to know. Income Tax exemption limit was raised by 50,000 to 2.5 Lakh, a sigh of relief, though he himself had promised for 5 Lakh made me sick of the double standard. 'Twitter' where the hashtag of '#budget2014' was trending, was full of jokes and concerns. they said their was nothing offered to lower middle class and below. while going through the highlights i fell the same, cheated.
The schemes offered were all good, No Budget ever offers a bad scheme. you can go through all the budget speeches since our independence, apart from few here and there wrong decisions, all of them offered good schemes. Close eye gives a clearer picture. all these offers are based on contracts and rest on committees ~ 5 IITs, 5 IIMs, 4 AIMS like institutes, Kisan TV, Internet connections in villages, Ganga cleanup, Sardar Patel statue (BTW it will be named as 'Statue of Unity), metros, increasing women safety, 100 smart cities, all brilliant plans and promises, i felt exactly the same when i read the election manifesto (doesn't matter of which political party more or less all were same).
Truly speaking i was disappointed, not because i was expecting some miracle, that expectation died soon after NDA's election campaign was started, any sensible person would have known that all that was promised were just a Vote pulling strategy, an product launching ceremony, moreover they were impractical by any standard. So miracle was not at all expected.
Expectation was to start from the basic, a party with clear majority in loksabha can do wonders in terms of decision making. But then all money, like always, was just handed over to a particular department. Inflation in retail was not even considered. nobody talked about improving standards government schools and hospitals, no one talked about sky raising fee of private nurseries and private schools, they dont talk about reducing prices of normal house holds, transport. basic requirement for all those new schemes of Kisan TV, internet, is electricity, Villages do not have electricity but they have a channel to watch now, what a joke. was any amount provided to encourage small business? to create new jobs? to reduce unemployment? to tackle corruption?
One thing is for sure, they dont put money where they cant get a benefit, each and every scheme offered, can be exploited, and is a money making factory. what we need is proper implementation and sensible use of hard earned money of tax payers.
By the way, if you smoke, you have been burnt. And for me, well for me its a dream come true, i am going to buy new shoes.... !!!
