Skip to main content

Taxes and Rules


“There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him,” said Robert A. Heinlein. All governments have taxed their citizens for everything from the needle in the haystack to the breasts that grew in the due course on a woman. I'm not exaggerating. India taxes sewing needles. The princely state of Travancore taxed the low caste women if they wanted to cover their breasts. 

If you want to buy a vehicle in India today, you'll end up paying more money than the price of the vehicle in the form of various taxes and fees. There's a tax on the vehicle (the highest slab in the country), on your use of the roads (which were constructed with your tax money in the first place), on insurance of all imaginable sorts, on your license, and what not. 

You pay all that and more, but the roads will continue to gape at you with their potholes that can kill you. Everything in this country seems to be designed to kill the citizens. But the government claims that it is looking after your welfare. Wow! That's great, isn't it? You have a government that cares so much about your welfare.

Now the government has multiplied by ten the fines for breaking certain traffic rules. You don't use a helmet while riding your bike. Okay, don't use, but pay Rs 1000 to the government. That's how the government cares for you. Your bike nosedives into one of those goddamn potholes and kills you. Well, the government has ensured that your insurance will take care of your postmortem and funeral expenditures. Of course, your corpse will get the amount after a deduction of Rs 1000 because you were not wearing the stipulated helmet. 

Some of these new rules are needed, of course. Too many children drive these days and hence regulations are required on that. There's much drunken driving and the fines are needed. It's a different matter that if you are a VIP like Sriram Venkitaraman you can get away with not only drunken driving but also murderous driving. That's India. The rules are for the common folks. The taxes too. 

I don't think that the hefty new fines are going to make India's roads any safer. What India needs is a culture that respects existing rules. What India needs is a culture that respects people. 

PS. Written for Indispire Edition 292 #trafficrules

I am taking my blog to the next level with Blogchatter’s #MyFriendAlexa


https://www.amazon.in/Gods-Love-Song-Tomichan-Matheikal-ebook/dp/B07WDYCK1T/ref=sr_1_2?crid=1O83XJY7TRMJB
Click the link to download my book 'God's Love Song' - absolutely free just for a day.

Comments

  1. I agree, we need a culture that respects rules and people.
    Hopefully long and harsh arm of the law will instill that culture, slowly but surely, among all of us.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I was punished left and right for anything and everything when i was young. I became a rebel. Punishment doesn't create a culture. Especially when the ruler is a known criminal.

      We need a good leader.

      Delete
  2. The more the amount of tax, the happier the traffic police would be!

    Very disgusting to learn about the tax on lower caste women! Thanks for throwing light on that too, sir.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The government is discovering new ways for filling the coffers. Imagine someone being fined an amount that's higher than the price of his bike!

      Delete
  3. Unbridled sarcasm... I guess, you may have reasons for this tone. Most of us will have a similar opinion. However, everything today is caught between rights and duties... though as a responsible citizen, I believe the hefty penalties will also, in the long term, ensure excellence in services.

    ReplyDelete
  4. well i am not fully agreed with you . It's we Indian who doesn't care about rules and regulation that is why we had the most accidental cases in a year through out the world .

    corruption is different thing but it was needed

    one will only understand when they loose someone coz' of these stupid fellows who doesn't care about road rules.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I agree with you. Indians must change their mind-set for there to be any lasting, progressive change. Well-written post.
    Noor Anand Chawla

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

India in Modi-Trap

That’s like harnessing a telescope to a Vedic chant and expecting the stars to spin closer. Illustration by Gemini AI A friend forwarded a WhatsApp message written by K Sahadevan, Malayalam writer and social activist. The central theme is a concern for science education and research in India. The writer bemoans the fact that in India science is in a prison conjured up by Narendra Modi. The message shocked me. I hadn’t been aware of many things mentioned therein. Modi is making use of Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan’s Centre for Study and Research in Indology for his nefarious purposes projected as efforts to “preserve and promote classical Indian knowledge systems [IKS]” which include Sanskrit, Ayurveda, Jyotisha (astrology), literature, philosophy, and ancient sciences and technology. The objective is to integrate science with spirituality and cultural values. That’s like harnessing a telescope to a Vedic chant and expecting the stars to spin closer. The IKS curricula have made umpteen r...

Two Women and Their Frustrations

Illustration by Gemini AI Nora and Millie are two unforgettable women in literature. Both are frustrated with their married life, though Nora’s frustration is a late experience. How they deal with their personal situations is worth a deep study. One redeems herself while the other destroys herself as well as her husband. Nora is the protagonist of Henrik Ibsen’s play, A Doll’s House , and Millie is her counterpart in Terence Rattigan’s play, The Browning Version . [The links take you to the respective text.] Personal frustration leads one to growth into an enlightened selfhood while it embitters the other. Nora’s story is emancipatory and Millie’s is destructive. Nora questions patriarchal oppression and liberates herself from it with equanimity, while Millie is trapped in a meaningless relationship. Since I have summarised these plays in earlier posts, now I’m moving on to a discussion on the enlightening contrasts between these two characters. If you’re interested in the plot ...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...