Taxes, shots (gin and vaccine), poxes -- more than just a rant

 May 4, 2021

I’m at that time of year when I am again doing taxes online, at a distance. Yes again. I remember being here last year too. The plan of course was to be in India, last year too, and work it through with my sis. Hers, our mums, mine and my daughters. But covid. Had other plans. And covid can you just drop me a line, or better still make an announcement on some world media forum what your future plans are for us? Please. 

 

But taxes. Stressful as it all is, it still would be ok except for—damn and darn—the government of India which makes rules, particularly for non-residents, that feel like harassment and HDFC securities which takes those rules and compounds them with inefficiency and stupidity. As I said in a WhatsApp group I am in – May a pox destroy every single body in the top cadre of that organisation. Ok I didn’t say top cadre but I should have. 

 

And I was told, I couldn’t go wrong using such a Shakespearean curse! 

 

But before I proceed I have to admit to consuming a shot of gin. It being the only alcohol I still have a stock of – Kinobi from Japan and very fine Irish gin, only one little shot left, given to me by my daughter’s Irish friend. And, then of course I had to google writers who wrote under the influence and I see I am in good company – Hemingway, Chandler, Joyce, Highsmith, Capote, King, Stevenson and lo and behold even Louisa May Alcott, double t and not double l.

 

Those  darn red tape things have been hitting me for a bit but despite that this morning I woke with conviction that I would (1) finish the blog post I had begun yesterday about loving what Bengal did (2) Train and (3) Wander and destress, maybe even buy a few, perhaps a half dozen, pens (I do need some fineliners), and notebook or two, before I went back to taxes this eve. Yes, I would devote this morning and afternoon to self-care.

 

But HDFC securities - or rather my sister calling about a problem created by this fine org -

had other plans for me. 

 

Meanwhile as I confessed on one of my WhatsApp chats that I was consuming brunch shots, well only one so far, I got a deluge of everyone’s favourite tipples. Single malts, feni, arruk and gin are the favoured ones. It seems it’s not just me who is severely stressed in this time. I am in even better company, than the writers I named above, with these soul sisters in Mumbai. Bless the Goddess that brought me to you, to them, in 1998 at the World-Work in India.

 

But seriously, yas seriously… India, dear India… We need prayers from the world… and we need more than that from the f---ing government at the centre…

Stop! Just stop now. Right now!

Stop. Trying to build image and worrying more about that, than the actual situation in the country. Everyone has seen you addressing rallies with no covid protocols when covid was rising in the country. Everyone, in the entire world, knows you chose this instead of governing. Everyone knows the path that brought us to here. The choices you made about prioritising the Ram temple (the tallest in the world) or the Central Vista, or a cricket stadium (the largest in the world) or trying to win Bengal instead of preparing for the next wave with a comprehensive vaccine policy and hospital beds and oxygen plants. It’s not people showing pics of burning dead bodies and crying about oxygen shortages that is spoiling the image of the BJP’s rule in India It is what you all did that messed up your image. 

 

And as I am typing this my sis calls. She, my mum, and her one helper, cannot get their second vaccine dose anywhere in Mumbai. Nope. None. Nowhere.

 

I know many put this failure on the state governments and also on the people who didn’t wear masks. But this is on you at the Centre – you made the vaccine policy, the decisions not to import, to control the doses sent to states and to export huge chunks while not funding the production of the next rounds. It is you, not the states, that is primarily responsible for the mess as you brought in the national disaster act, and the national epidemic act, and the f---ing kitchen sink, to centralise control. Control the thing you love most, more than the welfare of the people who voted you in.

 

So a pox on you too. And a pox on everyone who is trying to give this government a clean chit. Wake up. You who support blindly are killing the rest of us Indians too.

 

So underneath the anger, despair, frustration and helplessness I feel about my tax issue is really the angst I feel about how this country has been brought to this point by terrible governance, a compliant media and a whole bunch of blind supporters of the government who even now cannot stop defending them. 

 

Disclaimer – the opinions and emotional states shared in this blog belong not just to me, but also to a whole bunch of other Indians. 

And end note(?) or further disclaimer or confession – Hemingway, I think, said, write drunk, edit sober. I was neither drunk nor sober when I wrote and I didn’t bother with editing today.