The Middle Class saga

When I was born , God did not find any gold or silver or brass spoon to put in my mouth. Hence he thought that let’s try how one boy survives in the world without any such spoons and pushed me down to earth on one fine morning on the 14th of August.

My parents accepted me so happily. Obviously if I had a spoon , I would have gone to some other parents. But believe me I got the best in the world. I got my first lessons of honesty, integrity and how to lead a good life from them. More than anything , they taught me how to survive without spoons, and fulfilled God’s will.

There used to be a Mr.X in the village where I grew up. Of course he had a name. But for the sake of anonymity
let us call him X. He is not the villain of this story, but just represents a cross section of the society. He had several businesses, one of them was a timber mill. I remember the mill because of the sound of the whirring machines, which ran through out the day, and the smell of wood. That was a large place that we saw daily while on the way to school. He also used to be in financing , he had stores selling different wares. Overall he was one of the richest men around.

Mr.X used to own couple of luxurious cars. In fact , cars were not much of a sight in that place. In fact my own dream those days was to ride in a car one day. The maximum my Mom could afford was an autorickshaw , and that too was a luxury. We always used crowded city buses to travel. And that increased the intensity of my dreams to ride in a car one day. It would be the nicest things to happen to a kid, I thought.

My Grandpa (whose trophy I lost on the grounds of Nattassery - read http://sultanofutopia.blogspot.com/…/grandpas-cup-and-crick… -
knew Mr.X very well. He used tell that business was in trouble always and he never had much of an earning. “Thirumeni, I am doing this because I don’t know anything else to do ..”, he used to say, “and my family needs to have Kanji (the Malayalam term for simple food) atlas twice a day.”

But on the ground facts showed something different. Mr.X enjoyed the best things in life. His kids studied in the best school, wore the best clothes, roamed around in cars. Not that I am a jealous person, but remember that these were thoughts from a 10 year kid’s mind who wished to have everything in life.. I was even stupefied once when his daughter got a merit and means scholarship as her father earned only Rs.500 a month. My Dad who used to earn around Rs.2000 and still struggled to make ends meet, apparently was a rich person according to those standards.

Mr.X never paid any taxes, Grandpa used to say. Obviously , he had not much income, atleast not on paper. But he also used to say that X earned a lot. But government did not know what he earned, or sometimes just ignored it. And X also used share some of his earnings with government officials. That not only made him gracious, but made the government to again and again forget any earnings that if it all he got.

Since we were rich folks, we used to walk to school and back, rain or shine, around 5 miles every day.

Years later when I had travelled back to India after having stayed back in US for some duration, the IT department said that it too needed some amount from the meagre allowance that we used to get for onsite trips those days.

“But why..?” , asked I.. “ I have paid tax for this amount in the US too”

“That’s true.. But since you are from India, we too need tax amount from that”

“But that’s double taxation”. .

“Yeah.. We do this kind of cruel jokes on salaried employees..” (“We spare Mr.Xs though)

So I paid up.. Just in order to protect some of the remaining savings, I decided to put it in a simple FD in a nationalised bank.

“ You will have to pay 15% or more tax on the interest “ said the lady sitting behind the desk without a smile. (If you have noticed, 99% of the nationalised bank officials do not smile.)”

“But why, I have already paid two times tax for this”..

“Yeah.. But interest is income.. And you need to give something to the government”

The ride home took a long time due to the perpetual traffic jams that the broken and congested roads were responsible for.

But the government is investing all this money on the uplift of the poor - thought I while dropping some coins into the hand of a beggar who knocked consistently at my window during one of the traffic blocks…

See the GDP is breaking all barriers and growing..

Every budget session, I usually pray hard to the Gods Lord Vishnu and the FM - may be they will both discuss together and raise the income tax slab a bit..

The usual middle class man’s dream..

But they never did.. In taxation, FM is above God, and decides the fate of the people of the nation.

Those days, they put a lot of advertisement in TV on mutual funds.

“Invest in Mutual Funds..Don’t spend your money eating samosas or bajji ..Once you put in MFs, it just grows and grows and grows and makes you a rich man..”

So I stopped eating samosas and bajjis .. Even stopped and evening tea and started investing in MFs.

Till in the beginning of the year, the government again came to the scene and said..

“We will tax LTCG”.. It took me a bit to figure out that it was Long Term Capital Gain, meaning any profit that I make out of my investments more than a year will be taxed at 10%.

I am sure one of these days they will come to my home with a gun..

And ask me to pay up whatever I have..

The TV was running .. Seems Vijay Mallya is in UK and will come to India only if a villa style arrangement is made for him back home.. And NiMo is somewhere in Europe or US or Fiji or somewhere .. Enjoying the 11400 crores he usurped from common men like me.. And the Rotomac guy and the Choksis are also having the fun of their life.

IT minister Ravishankar Prasad said in Parliament that there were 25600 cases of fraud last year alone.

And the government needs to increase taxes, petrol & LPG prices and anything that the middle class uses to rake in the money lost. Who else can save India - the vote banks won’t and the corporate class doesn’t need to.

I am sure Buddha is smiling.. “ Gracefully let go of things, which are never meant for you.. “

But yes.. Next time, I should ask for a spoon.. Atleast a brass one.. By then, it might be hard to survive without one..