Union budgetary proposals are a tightly guarded secret before they are unveiled by the finance minister. In fact, there has hardly been a single instance of any leakage on this account since Independence. Realtors in Chennai, however, have a different take on this matter — of course, in a lighter vein. They claim that they knew before hand that the tax sops for the housing sector would continue.
Guess how did they find this out? A close relative of the finance minister had just wrapped up a prime real estate property deal for a handsome price. So what more do you want as an advance notice, they ask.
The moral of the story is that the next time you want to know what is in store for you in the budget, closely watch the moves of the relatives of the finance minister.
Cycle Circus
Those who meet Telugu Desam supremo Nara Chandrababu Naidu nowadays wonder where those laptops and other modern gadgets of the former tech-savvy chief minister have gone. Mr Naidu, some say, is not even the shadow of his former self.
There was no tom-tomming about Bill Gates or foreign investment or digital revolution in the party’s recently concluded conclave to assess the reasons for its electoral debacle. It was downright realpolitik.
But the icing on the cake came when Mr Naidu and his party MLAs decided to take a cycle ride to the secretariat to protest the oil price hike by the Manmohan Singh government. As a cynic put it, fortunes too come in cycles.
