To hell with whatever else the Budget proclaims to be, or do! For all I care, or know, Pranabda's is the best Budget ever since its inception. He knows that the shortest way to a person's heart is by making his wallet bulge.

More than anything else, he deserves kudos for his empathic leap to reach out to a section whose main preoccupation is to reminisce about the past, without much to look forward to in the future. I mean the senior citizens to whom everybody professes to lend a hand but nobody will lend a paisa!

As I, not only a senior citizen in my own right, but a post-80 something to boot, sat somnambulant watching Pranabda intoning a benumbing series of crores of rupees and billions of dollars, going into, or coming out of, this or that, he suddenly came out with a crop of announcements that made me rub my eyes and perk up.

First, at one stroke, he lowered the threshold to enter the senior citizens' league from 65 to 60. No doubt, he brought a larger number within the scope of exemption for senior citizens but I did wish he could have been more generous with the increase which was only Rs 10,000 (from Rs 2.40 lakh to Rs 2.50 lakh). Just for that paltry amount, should one be made to feel geriatric and gerontocratic (with a suggestion of being autocratic) five years earlier than before?

This thought, however, was quickly extinguished by Pranabda coming out with something that instantly made me his fan. You could have knocked me down with a feather! The creation of a special category of senior citizens of 80 years and more and giving them a whopping dollop of Rs 5-lakh exemption is clearly a masterstroke of a genius like Pranabda. I ought to know, having started my public service in West Bengal!

Pranabda, don't stop there! You are on the right track! From the next Budget, on humanitarian grounds, free the octogenarians totally from the nuisance of having to pay any tax.

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