Choked slowly by taxes and drowned under EMIs, with little write-offs on the platter, here’s how I will try to save some taxes, and enjoy Chidambaram’s fruits of budget from April 1. (Note to Chidambaram: See you next Feb; hope to get wiser about your figures in the interim). Over to my vow/wish list beginning next fiscal:

1. From April 1, I will enter a restaurant and tell the waiter, like Aamir Khan in Rangeela, “Aye khajoor, air-conditioner idhar ghuma. Extra tax fokat mein doon kya?”

2. I will stop buying that second packet of cigarettes. Instead, I will borrow from friends, relatives and colleagues. I will also stand close to smokers for passive smoking — at the risk of being bashed up by both women and men.

3. I will buy a flat, somewhere on the outskirts of Meerut or within main Bulandshahr for Rs 24 lakh to avail of the extra Rs 1.5-lakh exemption for home loans under Rs 25-lakh bracket, shift my existing home loan to a PSU bank and stop repaying the loan. I stand a 0.000040475997733344126 percent chance that my bad loan would be written off. After all, Chidambaram did write off f Rs 61,765 crore worth corporate tax in 2011-12, as Prasanna Mohanty writes (here).

4. I will request my wife to bank with Chidambaram’s proposed bank for women to feel more empowered. And since I just know that she will give me that you-daft-or-what look, But may be, just maybe, she will agree; then we might figure out how the women will be empowered by banking with such banks. Hopefully, some of that empowerment will rub off on me, too.

5. I will try to keep my annual income within Rs 1 crore in the next fiscal, so as to evade the 10-percent surcharge on such "relatively prosperous" persons.

6. I will buy as much agricultural land as possible, for in the name of helping the poor the government will exempt me from the 1-percent TDS when I sell those lands, unlike owners-turned sellers of all other property for over Rs 50 lakh.

7. I might not buy an imported yacht, as I do not fancy contributing to the government’s kitty any further by paying 100-percent import duty on it. But I might be tempted to get a ship or a vessel — or start eating more sabudana vadas, if I come a cropper on all those fronts, as their prices will go down, as TOI tells me.