‘If you take a walk, I’ll tax your feet’ and other joys

‘I can no longer afford to eat popcorn.’
| Photo Credit: Aathira Haridas _11730@Chennai

The older you get, the fewer new year resolutions do you need to make. In your 20s and 30s it is easy to make a list: give up smoking, wake up early, read Tolstoy, apologise to the classmate whose nose you broke in an argument, eat less red meat and so on. 

These are, of course, all worthy and wonderful resolutions. But I gave up smoking years ago, don’t eat red meat now and wake up early anyway. Maturity is that time in your life when you can make no more new year resolutions. Not because you are perfect and have no bad habits, but because you’d like to keep the remaining bad habits, thank you very much. 

But now I have been presented with something to give up. Eating popcorn. I can no longer afford to eat popcorn. Not because it has become prohibitively expensive, although it will become more expensive after the bureaucrat-accountants are through. Luckily, they don’t have more important things to work on. 

Popcorn has three different GST tax slabs which is a good way to ensure that many of us won’t be going to the movies either. To adapt the lyrics of a Beatles song, Should five percent appear too small / Be thankful I don’t take it all . 

In case the bureaucrat-accountants have run out of ideas, here’s another portion from the same song: If you try to sit, sit, I’ll tax your seat / If you get too cold, I’ll tax the heat / If you take a walk I’ll tax your feet. 

My problem isn’t with the taxes per se. They are wonderful, intelligent, necessary etc, as any news channel will tell you. I mean what could be more charming than having a five percent GST on popcorn mixed with salt, 12 percent GST if it is packaged and labelled and 18 percent if it is caramel popcorn? No issues hereat all. 

But what if I am at the popcorn counter at a movie theatre and find a few pieces of caramel has accidentally slipped into my packaged popcorn, and no one can work out the percentages? Hang on, the seller might say, its five percent for 332 of these pieces, then another 12 percent for the package (but since there’s no label, let’s make it 10 percent?) and 18 percent for the remaining 23 pieces. Or is it the other way around. Meanwhile, the movie is in full swing, the hero has run around one tree and emerged from the back of another. 

Or, having been allowed in after working out the higher mathematics, I watch the movie with my heart thumping in case a bureaucrat-accountant-cop noticed any discrepancy and decided to do his patriotic duty by arresting me?  This is not what the scientists mean when they say popcorn isn’t good for you, salted, sugared, packaged or labelled. 

Popcorn has been my companion at the movies for years. Sadly, then, farewell friend. A 100 percent goodbye it is.