Tax it

‘Tax’ also referred to as ‘Kar’ in our national language is the word which makes the people of our country go weak in the knees.

We earn money for ourselves and the government wants a share of it in some or the other means. This share is then ‘supposedly’ utilized for the betterment of the nation? We have been paying this tax since years undefined but still we are a ‘growing’ economy. The question comes to the mind…What are we ‘growing’? Unemployment, population, poverty, unhygienic situations? When will these perennial problems of the country cease ? Will these be the same churned out issues for the politicians to contest the elections every five years? The issues are similar, only the people who address them are different after a gap of five years.

When is this tag of ‘growing’ change to stable or a developed economy. How and where is this ‘tax’ collected from us from all possible ways directed?

Other than the repercussion of this small but rather heavy word on the national front, there is a certain genetic quality this word carries. If one observes, this word can be suffixed to any activity / noun, just as means to curb certain activities. Such quality of it makes it highly vulnerable to be used in an unhealthy manner to extract money. I realized this when I was charged for entering into a religious place in the pretext of ‘Yatri-kar’. I was taken aback, as to what the hell is this thing called ‘yatri-kar’, a ‘tourist tax’? Though the amount collected was miniscule, but the mis-use of the word and its implications made me think. My mind then wandered in all possible directions to explore the possibilities this word and the actions which can reap in the near future. We might to pay money for ‘Air tax’ , ‘Friendship tax’ , ‘Love tax’ , ‘Sex tax’ and what not. It has become a part of life – an inconvenient truth, perhaps!!!

The two aspects of this word is that it can be used in a positive connotation as well as negative implication. Consider a situation where the government wants to implement certain policy – take for example, curbing the use of cigarettes, they can implement something like ‘smoking tax’, which will benefit the country at large. The same word can be misused for forcing certain wrong doings like collecting money from people under certain pretext creating a ‘tax effect’.

Whatever the use of the word, the country needs proper channelization of the money collected from such a ‘created resource’. A nice tool for the government to increase the ‘pot of gold’, just by saying ‘tax it’.