Reality Bites: I want my Exempt-Bearer-From-Fuel-Taxes card now!

While a lot of mean jokes have been made comparing housing society presidents with Hitler, we must give them their due: When they organise celebrations for festivals, you do not have to contribute a penny if you choose not to attend. I only wish our Dear Leader would learn from them—I mean, even though most of those presidents are mad and ruthless, they show a little bit of restraint.

Our Dear Leader, however, makes the nation pay for all his expensive, gaudy celebrations over any old rubbish—why, a few days ago, there were garish lights on monuments, and literally a huge song and dance over the drop-in-the-ocean figure of “one billion doses”. While Godi Media cheered madly, normal media poured glacial water over their hysteria by laying out the facts.

“India has not vaccinated 1 billion people. It (sic) only given one billion doses, some of which were found to be in the name of dead people. So, far less than 21% of Indians are vaccinated of our 1.4 billion population,” pointed out a journalist on Twitter.

Now, I must make it clear that unlike the Dear Leader’s Fat Cat cronies who send their expensive perfumed lawyers to the Supreme Court almost daily for tax evasion cases, I dutifully pay my taxes. Much to the horror of my chartered accountant, I rejected his tax-saving hacks. I firmly told him that I would much rather the government used my money for the development of the nation (his scornful laughter continues to ring in my ears).

When I say development, I mean development. Not lavish self-glorification parties, and I will be drafting a petition soon. I demand revised tax forms in which there are multiple choice options on how I want my taxes to be spent.

For example:

1)Health care for all

2) Cakes for the Dear Leader’s birthday

3) Education for all

4) Military-grade spyware for the Dear Leader (so when he gets lonely, he can browse through our phones, look at our pictures, and check if we still adore him)

5) Free ration for the poorest of the poor without insects and stones

6) Fancy new planes for the Dear Leader so he can live out his wild fantasies of being the president of the USA

You get my drift? I absolutely abhor the idea of my hard-earned money being wasted by a self-centred spendthrift.

By the way, since the Dear Leader is selling most of our national assets to his Fat Cat cronies for a song, and urging the privatisation of education and healthcare, do we even have to pay taxes at all?

Also, I have had it up to here with his government’s ridiculous excuses on why fuel taxes are so high. We have been fed so much rubbish, but the one that rankled the most was by Rameswar Teli, the Union Minister for State of Petroleum and Natural Gas. He said fuel prices were high because the government spent money to provide free Covid-19 vaccinations. The cheek!

Another petition is being drafted in my feverish mind: I demand that all those who paid for their vaccinations (like me) should get cards that exempt us from fuel taxes, and I want my Kindly-Exempt-Bearer-From-Fuel-Taxes card now!

Of course, the astronomical rise in fuel prices has not bothered the Dear Leader’s fans. Not a squeak from the author who inspires English teachers to contemplate harakiri, the mango-obsessed actor who is a citizen of Canada, and all the rest who used the RSS-BJP toolkit to attack the UPA government when fuel prices were about half of what they are now.

The most stunning tweet was by Lala RumDaze in 2012. He said that if black money comes back, petrol will be available at the rate of Rs 30 per litre in the country. It’s 2021 now, his Dear Leader has been in power since 2014, besides we were told that the Great Demonetisation Scam of 2016 would end the black money racket, but fuel is now over 100 rupees a litre—gosh, that’s a dramatic rise in black money!

When this was pointed out a few days ago, Lala RumDaze promptly deleted his revealing tweet. He probably enjoys his morning walks.

(Any resemblance to real people or events is a coincidence)