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. Pradeep NairSeptember 21, 2019 at 1:03 PM

    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. Tomichan MatheikalSeptember 21, 2019 at 4:38 PM

      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. wingsSeptember 22, 2019 at 10:34 AM

      Hundred percent true!

      Delete
  2. wingsSeptember 22, 2019 at 10:36 AM

    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. Tomichan MatheikalSeptember 22, 2019 at 10:40 AM

      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. Arvind PasseySeptember 22, 2019 at 3:25 PM

    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. "Anny" The AnuragSeptember 22, 2019 at 7:05 PM

    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. A Lady LawyerSeptember 24, 2019 at 9:02 PM

    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

Break Your Barriers

  Guest Post Break Your Barriers : 10 Strategic Career Essentials to Grow in Value by Anu Sunil  A Review by Jose D. Maliekal SDB Anu Sunil’s Break Your Barriers is a refreshing guide for anyone seeking growth in life and work. It blends career strategy, personal philosophy, and practical management insights into a resource that speaks to educators, HR professionals, and leaders across both faith-based and secular settings. Having spent nearly four decades teaching philosophy and shaping human resources in Catholic seminaries, I found the book deeply enriching. Its central message is clear: most limitations are self-imposed, and imagination is the key to breaking through them. As the author reminds us, “The only limit to your success is your imagination.” The book’s strength lies in its transdisciplinary approach. It treats careers not just as jobs but as vocations, rooted in the dignity of labour and human development. Themes such as empathy, self-mastery, ethical le...
3 comments
Read more

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
47 comments
Read more

Mahatma Ayyankali’s Relevance Today

About a year before he left for Chicago (1893), Swami Vivekananda visited Kerala and described the state (then Travancore-Cochin-Malabar princely states) as a “lunatic asylum.” The spiritual philosopher was shocked by the brutality of the caste system that was in practice in the region. The peasant caste of Pulayas , for example, had to keep a distance of 90 feet from Brahmins and 64 feet from Nairs. The low caste people were denied most human rights. They could not access education, enter temple premises, or buy essentials from markets. They were not even considered as humans. Ayyankali (1863-1941) was a Pulaya leader who emerged to confront the situation. I just finished reading a biography of his in Malayalam and was highly impressed by the contributions of the great man who came to be known in Kerala as the Mahatma of the Dalits . What prompted me to order a copy of the biography was an article I read in a Malayalam periodical last week. The article described how Ayyankali...
14 comments
Read more

The Irony of Hindutva in Nagaland

“But we hear you take heads up there.” “Oh, yes, we do,” he replied, and seizing a boy by the head, gave us in a quite harmless way an object-lesson how they did it.” The above conversation took place between Mary Mead Clark, an American missionary in British India, and a Naga tribesman, and is quoted in Clark’s book, A Corner in India (1907). Nagaland is a tiny state in the Northeast of India: just twice the size of the Lakhimpur Kheri district in Uttar Pradesh. In that little corner of India live people belonging to 16 (if not more) distinct tribes who speak more than 30 dialects. These tribes “defy a common nomenclature,” writes Hokishe Sema, former chief minister of the state, in his book, Emergence of Nagaland . Each tribe is quite unique as far as culture and social setups are concerned. Even in physique and appearance, they vary significantly. The Nagas don’t like the common label given to them by outsiders, according to Sema. Nagaland is only 0.5% of India in area. T...
13 comments
Read more

Rushing for Blessings

Pilgrims at Sabarimala Millions of devotees are praying in India’s temples every day. The rush increases year after year and becomes stampedes occasionally. Something similar is happening in the religious places of other faiths too: Christianity and Islam, particularly. It appears that Indians are becoming more and more religious or spiritual. Are they really? If all this religious faith is genuine, why do crimes keep increasing at an incredible rate? Why do people hate each other more and more? Isn’t something wrong seriously? This is the pilgrimage season in Kerala’s Sabarimala temple. Pilgrims are forced to leave the temple without getting a darshan (spiritual view) of the deity due to the rush. Kerala High Court has capped the permitted number of pilgrims there at 75,000 a day. Looking at the serpentine queues of devotees in scanty clothing under the hot sun of Kerala, one would think that India is becoming a land of ascetics and renouncers. If religion were a vaccine agains...
8 comments
Read more