apurva

Sometimes I wonder: if it's all a Grand Design? Government deliberately puts us in such situations. Think about it like this. Traders were fine with the regime. Then came more and more restrictions. Starting with Less weekly expiries. ELM. STT hikes. Yet, Traders were trying to navigate. They adapted. They found new ways to survive. So, kill it all -- CAS. Now, the point here is this: people will always keep the stress of making Money as the Top priority. Because when income gets in trouble, one doesn't focus on anything else. Survival comes first. And this is where the larger picture begins to emerge. The Government has been taking: Taxes on Transactions (STT) Taxes on Income, which you make after paying the Taxes at the first place Tax on Expenses (GST) various other forms of taxes, cess and surcharges This is a never ending list. All of it keeps reducing the final income in hand -- The Net Disposable Income. So what happens when disposable income keeps getting squeezed? People look for ways to make more. Traders resort to higher leverage to Trade. Others turn to Personal Loans. Credit Card Debt. And once you're in, you never get out. You keep earning to service the debt created to maintain the lifestyle that your shrinking disposable income can no longer support. And there is another layer to this -- Compliance. Less for Traders, perhaps, but monumental for any Business. Any Entrepreneur in India spends more time complying, filing, documenting, reporting and paying, while the cost of running the business keeps rising. Yet, in the midst of all this, something rather important gets lost. You forget to ask: Where are my Taxes going? What about the quality of Life the Government is supposed to offer? Because asking that question requires something that becomes increasingly scarce when people are financially stressed: when a person's primary concern is paying the next EMI, recovering the Trading loss, clearing the credit card bill, keeping the business alive or simply maintaining the house, the larger questions begin to disappear from the Mind. Politics becomes secondary. Governance becomes secondary. Accountability becomes secondary. Survival becomes the primary focus. And this is "The Grand Design". You don't necessarily have to silence people by force. It can be done in a more subtle way. You can simply keep them sufficiently occupied with their own financial survival. A financially stressed population spends its energy fighting its own circumstances. It has less energy left to question the circumstances created around it. And perhaps this is where the entire cycle closes. And somewhere in the chaos, the most fundamental questions get drowned out.