Missing in Action

I think I might know where the missing ex- tourism minister is. I’m referring here to the recent hit-and-run who goes by the pseudonym of Mickey (the rat) Placebo that our police force (Motto: “We Do Have A Motto, But We Don’t Know Where It Is”) has apparently misplaced.

Given the excitement of the ongoing census, you might have missed all the news stories of this Ratol Runaway, which is getting a whole lot of media attention (as difficult as this is to believe) it has nothing to do with Ajmal Kasab.

The background is; Mickey was sweet on a girl, whom we shall call Dania Dorado. One day Dania “by accident” ate a whole tube of Ratol while brushing her teeth. She over-brushed to the point that she was overcome with the resultant euphoria, slipped on the wet floor, ricocheted off the door jamb, (causing multiple contusions to her body), and went comatose.

Mickey meanwhile was busy playing the Casino tables. His sleight-of-hand had just won him a bundle of cash, and he called Dania to give her the good news. But hearing the bad news instead he rushed to her side. Being the Boy Scout that he is, he decided to do his good deed for the day and spend some of his ill-gotten gain trying to revive the lady, so that she would be eternally grateful, fall into his manly arms and have meaningless sex. He flew her here, he flew her there, he flew her everywhere; but alack and alas she succumbed to the charms of the grim reaper instead.

However this interfered with the census taking, after all having people die AFTER having put in all their details defeats the very purpose of a census. It also means a lot of tedious paperwork. So the government ordered an investigation to set out to prove that said Dania was still alive.

This seemed like a good idea, since the Goa government- which is the fourth-largest financial entity in India after the Ambani Brothers, Mayavati and your local paanwala- had not conducted a reliable census with live people since the first Vasco Da Gama landing.

As you can imagine, the census is a huge job. The enumerators spent thousands and thousands of hours, going from door to door, and producing reams of paper to be kept in a government record room in a 150 metre long bread box containing billions of other pieces of paper and what are believed to be Dr. Jack de Sequeira original spectacles along with the original recipe for Chicken Xacuti.

The reason the government did not get around to ordering a census any sooner is that it has been extremely busy with it’s primary functions, which are (1)spending money; (2)publishing souvenirs on it’s fantasy accomplishments in the last 49 years (3) increasing prices.

When the enumerators finally finished, they released the census report which also contains these alarming findings:

- It turns out that both “Mickey” and “Francisco” is actually the same person, and he used to be a tailor.

- Although according to the Indian Constitution there are supposed to be thirty sitting judges along with the Chief Justice in the Supreme Court, an exhaustive search of the premises, including under all the desks, turned up only a dozen.

- In the last 6 months, the Task Force on Unique Identification Document, headed by Nilesh Nilekani, spent 200 crores, without any authorization or supporting documentation to rescue a monitor lizard and buy Congress party flags. In contrast the Goa government spent only 2 crores to get a feasibility study on the Vasco–Dona Paula sea link.

- Morjim in North Goa is missing. “We think Russia took it,” stated the enumerators, “but every time we called up St.Petersburg to ask about it, they just laughed and hung up.”

Now I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is that I made up the above census findings. The bad news is the real census findings are worse. I do not refer to the findings that the administration has no idea what happened to 24 kilos of “weed” missing from the police locker. That is totally understandable. Why else would so many foreign tourists stroll around garbage ridden streets, stay in overpriced hotel rooms, eat unpalatable restaurant food served by surly waiters, and hire rip-off taxis with negligent, ill-mannered drivers to drive on dangerous, narrow, ill-maintained roads, if not for the lure of good ganja.

Nor I am referring to the fact that the Chief Minister is off busily inaugurating public toilets and breaking coconuts on road-rollers, such that it leaves little time to attend to routine matters of law and order.

I’m sure if the police took some time out from their highway activities of ripping off unsuspecting tourists on the southern ends of the Mandovi and Zuari bridges, they’d quickly find Mickey and a lot of this so-called “lost” weed.

FIRST POLICEMAN: Ok I’ll just check behind the cushions of this politicos lounge sofa and…. Hey, here’s some! Looks like a total of, let me see, two, three, four….Wow! That’s six whole kilos of weed!

SECOND POLICEMAN: So THAT’S what happened to it! Hey! Is that a Supreme Court justice ?

So I’m confident that both Mickey and the weed are around somewhere. What has me concerned is the government might wake up one day and find fighter aircraft, battle tanks and naval ships missing, and what if we have a defense emergency and we need these missing items? Are our fighter pilots going to sit on the runway and make fighter plane noises with their mouths? After all if the government doesn’t know where it’s own tourism minister is, what ELSE doesn’t it know? For example I heard a tourist guide in Panaji pointing out a huge building to his group calling it “The Secretariat”, and after a while I saw another tourist guide point out a boob-shaped structure in Porvorim informing them that this was “The Secretariat”. This has to be a mistake. Why do we need TWO Secretariats when we have only the one useless government! Unless we’ve lost THAT, too.

So methinx that the Goan government should stop whatever it’s doing and concentrate on finding all the stuff it’s missing. I think a good place would be to start looking in the River Princess.

There’s a lot of stuff in there; it would not surprise me one bit if there was a fighter jet in there somewhere. So I say to the government: Go and get it! And while you’re there please remove Mickey Placebo, because he’s starting to smell.

Blistering Barnacles! It's those Blithering Budgets again!

Picking up this months issue of Business Goa, I perused Prakash Kamat’s “bird’s eye view” of Goa’s additional budget for 2009-10, and harkened back to the one presented at the centre in July; immediately after which the markets tanked. I noticed with pride and pleasure a marked similarity in both budgets – neither made any fiscal sense.

So while we play “Here- we- go- round- the- Budget- Bush” again, I imagine many of you readers, especially the ones with smaller brains, are still eagerly awaiting my annual guide to how you should handle your fiscal deficits for the rest of the year - not counting alimony payouts.

Listening to Pronob (A phor apple, B phor Bhejetoble )Mukherjee made me realize what a crashing bore he is; it also made me realize that if I went around looking for an interpreter to translate the Budget and decipher all those acronyms such as MAT, FBT,GST,FRBM,UID and FRBM I would end up losing money in the process, by having to shell out service tax AND education cess to a government which neither provides any service, and collectively, has all the education of the primary section of a school of village idiots.

Those of you who fortunately read my column last year where I advised you to cheat and give less money to the government, thereby helping reduce government spending… no wait! That was the year before. Last year was spent trying to find my stockbroker and I profoundly apologise for disappointing my loyal fans who look forward to my annual tax-advice article.

Anyway I’m proud to report that many of you went all out to support the Prime Minister, and re-elected him, and I’m sure he will thank every one of you personally... once global oil prices go down and the stock market goes up, or he finds out who has been messing with his turbans.

In the meantime we have an entirely new budget. This year Pronob Babu needs all the money he can get, because when going over the figures with his finance secretaries Santa Singh and Banta Singh, they noticed that the government was going to be short by something like 6.8 % of GDP (which means that the government wants to spend more and more money by giving all the babus increased salaries once again, and buy additional exploding devices to defend you with)

I’m not kidding, in a show of great unity and camaraderie Diggu K. (taking time off from his busy schedule of inaugurating new bathrooms in Government buildings, along with longtime opponent Manu P. (who also deferred inaugurating a couple of questionable beauty parlours) unanimously passed a proposal for MLA’s in the Goa Legislative Assembly, with cheers all around as follows :

Daily Allowance: hike from 750 to 1000 when on duty (Huh?? When ARE these guys on duty?)

Assembly sitting fees: 300 to 700 (Shouldn’t it be sleeping fees?)

Housing Advance hike: 12 lakh to 30 lakh (Can’t they just house them in the assembly? They sleep there anyway!)

Constituency Allowance: 26000 to 55000 (Said constituents being their family and relatives)

Four Personal Assistants: 18000 per month to 32000 per month (not including file-forwarding “fees”)

Meanwhile Dr. Tamba’s 19 contract staff; hired to deal with the H1N1 swine flu have been told that there are no funds to pay their salaries any more , much less to treat patients…..at the time of publishing this I hear Dr.Tamba has been conveniently replaced with his compounder, and transferred to some unknown location for being a whistle blower.

But this year we have a new tax plan. The government is ecstatic about raising taxes once again. It believes that if God did not want them to raise taxes, He would not have created the Income Tax Department. So since time immemorial governments have seen the importance of taking money away from the public.

See, if you were allowed to keep the money you would not spend it on the maintenance of your local MLA’s children’s education at Harvard, or to pay off his debts at the Casinos. You’d just use it to buy another cow or something. But the government will spend it, thereby creating jobs.

In this case the government will spend crores of rupees in a major security program, creating new factories to manufacture high security registration plates for all vehicles in the country.Examples from Karnataka given below which require either 1) A multi-lingual ability or 2) A portable bar code reader.

This will not only ensure that, in the event of you being carjacked, your car can only be sold for spare parts; it will also create a new auctioneering forum for collectors of antique registration plates.

The government will also spend lakhs of rupees on a major publicity campaign, for television and newspaper ads that go like this:

TRANSPORT MINISTER RAM “DAHI” LICKER ......and the Department of Transportation are pleased to announce that for the next 75 kilometers there will be road blocks all over the place and hundreds of relatives of a contractor who manufactures high security registration plates in the factory premises owned by……. TRANSPORT MINISTER RAM “DAHI” LICKER standing around with lathis and red flags and directing traffic so casually that they may occasionally direct your car into an oncoming tanker loaded with LPG, so please bear with us ,we regret the inconvenience, but as…….. TRANSPORT MINISTER RAM “DAHI” LICKER pointed out when he flew in by government helicopter to make a speech taking credit for the 3-year long ongoing 102.37 crore landslide repair project at Porvorim NH 17, we cannot allow our national highways to deteriorate especially ones that will provide access to land which will be grabbed by…….. TRANSPORT MINISTER RAM “DAHI” LICKER

The best way to look at this whole issue is to understand what the government does: It takes away money from a few people, keeps a major chunk of it, and then gives away the rest to other people.

So basically you will find that there are two types if people in India: A) People who pay more to the government than they can ever hope to get from it, i.e. the taxpayers. B) People who get more from the government than they give to it: Politicians, elected governments officials, rich farmers, government contractors, arms brokers, government employees, statue sculptors.

So, if you are an ordinary taxpayer, the only way this annual tax-advice column of mine need really concern you is for you to be aware that: In some way or the other the government is going to waste more and more of your money; the question is, where is it going?

Demo(n)cratic Elections

Standing or Seated

With elections round the corner, the average Goan, depending on his religious upbringing, decides to vote for a “standing” candidate or a “seated” one.

For the Hindu, Mrs. Bhandekar, “Mr. Kamath electionak bosla” (Mr.Kamath is sitting for the elections) and for the Catholic,Miss Fonseca, “Mr. Robeiro electionak ubo ravla” (Mr.Robeiro is standing for the elections). Be that as it may, once elected all the chosen candidates religiously go into hibernation (Soglo Nidlya) till the next electoral cycle, and the electorate goes back to its humdrum life of fleecing the tourist.

Fortunately Goa is blessed with many courageous political leaders who refuse to succumb to lethargy, petty underhanded methods of horse-trading and buying voters; who are fearless & willing to speak up for fairness and reason and work untiringly to better the lives of the common citizenry, even though this might hurt their re-election chances.
Ha Ha! I am of course making a hilarious joke here.

In line with the Indian ethos, Goa’s political leaders too hold all kinds of national bullshitting records. Many of them would need major surgery to have their lips removed from their constituencies' butts.

Some of them try to take on several constituencies simultaneously; and these leaders remind you of those bumper cars you find at Essel World and other amusement parks, that rush around randomly, changing direction whenever they hit another car or a wall.
BOINK they hit the Goenkar car, so they change direction and bounce until BOINK they hit the Maratha car, which sends them careening off into BOINK the Christian car, which is not to be confused with BOINK the Hindu car, which sends them ricocheting into BOINK the Migrant Labour wall, and so on.

This kind of bold leadership has needless to say created a tremendous sense of fellowship, as was demonstrated during the recent IFFI 2006 / Regional Plan 2011 meetings / Carnival / Red & Black Dance(choose any one), when the various ethnic communities displayed a generous spirit of mutual trust and understanding rarely seen outside of Iraq.

So what do the elections seek to address this time around. Like all other elections so far here is what we’ve got: (Sing to the tune of "Who could ask for anything more! ")
We’ve got crime.
We’ve got Violence.
We've got Citizens Suffering in Silence.
We’ve got rampant, rude, frantic IQ – impaired motorists who don’t obey the laws of physics.
Have we left anything out?
The garbage?
The crowding and overdevelopment and continued aggressive uglification of the landscape?
The endless highway deconstruction?
The water shortage?
The corruption?
The stray dogs getting dangerous enough to be registered for road transport licence plates?
The invertebrate political leadership, tip-toeing nervously round a caste-and-creed-ridden ethnic minefield of their own creation.
We've got music ,we've got rhythm, and who could ask for anything more !

We nevertheless will continue to exercise our franchise fearlessly, things are going to change soon - or NOT.