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Another year, another budget, another dream!

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DQW Bureau
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'o, cera, cera, what will be, will be!'

Now that it is budget time, media is full of conjectures of what the FM is going to come up with this time. That way it probably finds it difficult to shrug off its penchant for delving into the future. Watch any of the news channels on TV and every media person seems to be putting words in the mouth of the person he is interviewing.

I for one have got a little weary of budgets. Especially the so-called 'dream' budgets. We had one quite some time back from Mr Chidambaram, and another one last year from Mr Sinha. Both dreams seem to have gone sour. In fact we never seem to be able to meet the budgeted figures. We probably also know the reasons why. And yet we continue with this charade of churning out dream after dream. (Now that we finally have Hema Malini joining politics, we may finally have a real dream budget in the times to come from the dream girl!)

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But that may be a long way off (if not a pipe dream), and till then we will need to manage somehow! After all, we cannot stop our finance ministers from aspiring to present the perfect dream. It is just once in a year that they get all the attention, and it would therefore be very natural for them to try and make the most of the opportunity. Those who have not presented dream
budgets haven't fared better anyway. At least this way they end up getting some adulation, even if briefly. 

The thing that I like about them most is that they appear to be ever so optimistic about the economy. Maybe they know that the industry will try and do whatever it can to survive and grow. So irrespective of its proposals, whatever has to happen will happen. That could possibly explain their cheerful disposition. (If you promise not to tell the whole world around, I will let you into a secret. Try catching the finance minister singing in his bathroom on the day of the budget. You will find him singing that old hit, 'o, cera, cera, what will be, will be!')

The question next is how do we get out of this situation? It certainly does not make sense to wait a whole year to find out
what will actually happen! If you are getting worried at the enormity of the problem, take heart. It helps to break the problem into its constituent elements and then solve each smaller problem. In our case, since the private sector has to fend for itself anyway, the problem is really limited to finding out what the government sector will do (or not do)! After all aren't they the ones who are attributed with all the unproductive expenses that make all the projections go wrong!

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So the key to projecting what will happen of the dream budget is to discover a method of interpreting the 'dream'. If you think I am talking out of my hat, think again! Ever since I flew to Mumbai by an Indian Airlines flight in August 1998, I have become a believer in the art (or science) of interpreting dreams! 'Swagat', the in-flight magazine carried an article that enumerated what those things we saw in our dreams were supposed to mean. 

For the first time I was tempted to carry the magazine with me despite the instructions to the contrary. Since then I have tried to correlate my dreams and real life events (to the limited extent that the article enabled me). And surprisingly, I have found a considerable degree of truth in what the article said. For instance if you were to see yourself climbing a ladder, it was a sign of professional progress. The opposite was true if you were to climb down one. Seeing yourself traveling was a sign of bad times ahead. The more advanced the mode of travel, the worse it was likely to turn out for you. If you had a choice, you would do well to prefer the bus to the airplane! (Sad that dreams don't offer any options!)

So the Herculean task before anyone wanting to graduate to interpreting budgets (dreamy or otherwise) is to correlate the budget proposals of the last fifty odd years and the actual results of our economic and financial performance. I am sure this could be an interesting project for a PhD scholar. For everything that the finance ministers have proposed over the years, we could list out what actually happened and arrive at a model interpretation of what is proposed vis-à-vis what is likely to happen.

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Imagine how much it would simplify everyone's work. People would know exactly what was going to happen and could therefore take better decisions rather than live in a world of make believe. The stock market could react appropriately right at the outset rather than get into alternate bouts of frenzy and despair. Government employees could avoid heartaches caused by proposals to cut down on manpower in government departments. The trade unions could spare themselves needless activity derived from the face value of the proposals! The parliament too could spare itself all those debates and wordy duels that finally come to nothing. Most of all, an entire nation could be spared those great expectations and that feeling of helplessness that follows when the system fails to deliver, year after year.

The problem is that the media guys would run out of work too! They wouldn't have anyone to interview and ask for opinions, since the masses would no longer be interested in these opinions. Events like the budget currently generate at least a month of activity for them. What would they do then?

Well, the pre budget activities would not really be affected since what they do is basically ask everyone for their opinion of what the finance minister should do or will do. What they could end up doing post budget is to start interpreting the budget from a 'dream' perspective to explain to the masses what will actually happen. (I am sure that would generate more interest than the budget programs currently do!)

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A bye product of such activity would be that it would generate employment opportunities for people in another field of expertise! Considering the manner in which our psephologists are biting the dust with their projections of election results, we might soon need to create avenues of alternative employment for them! (Who says dreaming can't be a productive exercise?)

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