TAXING TIMES IN CHENNAI

I was in need of something to achieve this morning.

I managed to run my car a full month on a single tank of petrol (still the actual fuel economy is well below Toyota's claims - what do those guys smoke?), assisted someone with his Harvard Business School application (some might wonder why I would want to inflict yet another HBS graduate on the world, but that is a matter for another day) and generally managed to stay within my budget for the month.. I started to manage the finances of our fractious and fractured housing Condo. All these still left me in need of a sense of (greater) achievement. Ah, yes, I even managed not to have fresh scars on my car which if you know Chennai is a considerable achievement. Chennai has this interesting relationship with wealth and symbols of wealth, such as a car - we absolutely despise the ones without it and envy the ones with it. We display this through a fierce protection of our own assets from vandalism and by vandalising others'. But I digress.

I felt I needed to achieve something bigger this morning. What could be more challenging than trying to pay one's taxes? Challenging from many different perspectives: firstly, bringing oneself to pay something to an entity that in one's opinion does not deserve it; secondly the act of finding the money  is a challenge; and thirdly the act of payment is made as near a physical impossibility as any group of humans can manage it. When I sat at my computer to make the payments the local government was upto the challenge and made it impossible to do this on line.Suddenly I belonged to the wrong "area", "ward" and "Sub" (whatever that one is) compared to six months ago. Then I decided to beard the lion in his den. I decided to visit the office that supposedly collects property taxes.

This is a very brave act and not to be undertaken lightly.The government was upto the challenge and defeated my ill-considered essay by not being where it was supposed to be. Anywhere else this might be inconceivable. Not in Chennai, India. Noticing that my continued cruising around was drawing unwelcome attention, I beat a hasty retreat and looked for something else to achieve, one still involving the government.

I discovered that my "water taxes" were due. The phrase "water tax" is a misnomer - there is a component of the payment that is classified a "Tax" and another which is a "charge". The Tax is a percentage of the annual rental value which, according to the government, is less than 50% of what similar residences in my Condo fetch every month. In short, it is a figment of the government's imagination although imagination is not a word one associates with governments. The other component, the "charge", is not related to anything, particularly the actual consumption of water.

The decision not to pay the water tax/charge online was for a simple reason: their servers do not work before or after hours and generally not at all the rest of the time. I was possessed of a steely determination to make the payment by appearing at their office in person. Excited as I was, I was also filled with apprehension about the absence of key officials, the fact of having paid these taxes on line for the last two years (such payments are generally held to be "untraceable") and about the approach of lunch time when all activity ceases; any of the above could have rendered my attempt null and void. I joined the queue, considered taking a short-cut available for "senior citizens", dropped that idea - if you want to be considered a Senior in Chennai, you must look old, feel old, be bald or at least fully grey and dress old - and queued up. When my turn came up, which wasn't long, it was all over in a moment with a zap of a handheld laser barcode reader. All my payments records were on screen, including my online payments. Money changed hands, got classified into "Tax" and "Charge"  and a receipt was duly issued. I was so pleasantly taken aback that I want to go back again. The problem is, they only bill me once every six months.

I am seriously thinking of petitioning the Government to accept my payments every month.

What's the World Coming to?

I am depressed
Again.

This time the condition has not been brought on by the texting generation's favourite phrase. Nor due to the intimation of my God's infirmities and inabilities.

The last one is not true; not exactly anyway. I have been informed that my God is an elaborate hoax and not by a school drop-out domestic help.

Let me begin at the beginning, although considerable uncertainty surrounds what exactly was the beginning  and what existed before the beginning. It is what Physicists call a "singularity" which is a code word for "I don't know and would prefer that you don't ask". Physicist-parents refer to their extremely wayward offspring as "singularities". Ordinary parents do not so refer to their children because they - the parents -  are unaware of  what singularity means and think it is the state of being single. Isn't that the purpose of all technical jargon: to confuse the uninitiated and confound the unfamiliar? Anyway, getting back to the very "beginning", I have just been informed that there was no beginning to begin with.

You see the idea of "beginning" mattered to the creationists or the  "bubble theorists" who thought that the universe started like a bubble and kept expanding like one, darkly implying that like a bubble it would one day burst too. They preferred to remain silent about the drop of soapy water which became the bubble. The Steady-Statists  preferred to think of a universe without a Beginning or End which is fine so long as you are dealing with the middle, but can get to be embarrassing when near the extremities. This view vibed well with  some Hindu traditions that posited gods with neither beginning nor end; Such views conveniently closed their eyes to the myths about gazillion gods who were born, grew up and died just like any human. Now I am told that a beginning or an end exists only in our minds and are not "real" or "absolute".

I preferred a world where starting somewhere if I went in some direction long enough I  would reach the End with no further progress possible. A world that had length, width, depth and, thanks to Einstein, Time. I am now informed that Time and Space do not exist but are just my mental constructs, a result of my "consciousness". This last-named is a concept much beloved of men like Deepak Chopra and J.Krishnamurthy. It is particularly upsetting to have one's orderly world of mathematical certainties  turned upside down by the wishy-washy stuff of Krishnamurthy, Chopra et al.

Mine was a world in which given the  "Initial Conditions", I could compute my state any time. With a fair amount of precision. Mine was a world where Radios, Lasers, LCD TVs, MRIs and PET Scans, all worked and entertained, diagnosed and even cured. I thought I understood how these worked - well, not quite, but I knew vaguely the principles on which they were based and could comprehend, if someone explained them minus the maths. It was a world in which if I learnt the right maths, and tried hard enough I could explain the Universe - well, not all of it, but all except before the Beginning and  after the End. So long as you didnt want to know where everything was and what they were doing at the same time, I could explain everything, give or take a few "anomalies".

Now along comes someone who is not even a Physicist ( a medical doctor, for pete's sake) and says the whole thing is a trick of our minds.

Enough to depress anyone I would imagine.