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        If February, being the Budget month, is all about number crunching, March is when you take stock, marking as it does the end of the financial year. With the new Finance Bill taking effect from 1 April, these thirty days present the last op for corporates as well as the common man not just to erase past accounting sins but also to get fresh tricks ready to beat the FM's traps. And for the FM himself, this period offers a chance to rethink and/or rollback some provisions, under pressure from or for the pleasure of lobbies.

        The advent of Manmohanomics in 1991 made the budget a significant annual event. But sixteen years hence, budgets appear to have lost their shine. This is because, with the shift from socialism to capitalism having been effected seamlessly, the latitude for the spectacular has come down drastically with scope only for cosmetic tinkering. If one can rise above the scholarly din raised by prime-time pundits who keep popping up all over the place and dumping opinions on unsuspecting audiences, it is easy to see that budgets are a non-event. Yet the routine calculations will happen this March too as it did in the pre-reforms era, because budgets are all about our bread and butter, quite literally. You can add some oil and vegetable too plus some salt to taste, if you wish.

        But even as the gainers and losers count the blessings and bane wrought by the budget, number games are afoot in other spheres of national activity too. Indeed, February has been a very eventful month and the past week, particularly, had so much to offer for the arithmetically inclined, that, come March, the budget has quickly and quietly slipped down the charts. While the elections to a few State Assemblies, Quattrocchi and the blast on Samjhauta train were the three main chart-busters, there were a host of other issues that also called for calculations beyond the pale of dull economics.

        The outcome of the polls to Punjab and Uttarakhand has clearly upset Congress calculations. The grand old party bids to blame anti-incumbency and an inflated economy for the debacle, but it is pretty obvious that the BJP has touched the bottom and is now upwardly mobile. And you can bet, it is not just political pundits who may be reworking the electoral arithmetic a good two years in advance for the next national polls. Many of the current partners in the UPA regime, who were past allies of the BJP, would have already started counting their parliamentary chickens for that distant democratic event and eventuality. The Left too will feel more emboldened to increase its stranglehold on its secular ally. Indeed, the Congress like the BJP, would soon realise that coalition politics is a zero sum game.

        But it is not just the BJP that bounced back last week. Quattrocchi, the foreign fugitive wanted in the Bofors pay-off case surfaced in Argentina out of the blue and is all set to vanish again. For those who want to see real-life versions of the familiar bumbling cops of reel, the CBI sleuths would fit the bill. Or probably, they are really smart and are only playing the robber and police game for public consumption, we do not know. In any case, by current standards those 64 or so crores of Indian rupees is a pittance that even a ward councillor would scoff at ... while pocketing, that is. Also, Friends, Romans and countrymen, all now know that the money is invisible unlike Q of whom we at least get occasional glimpses. But hell, don't we deserve to know who the ultimate beneficiary, the elusive Mr X ...or Mrs X, (just for gender equality) is? As a special case, we can even request the FM to waive tax on that income from other sources, if only we get to know the answers ...and the 'assessee'. Aah, the CBI can easily solve this Swedish Sudoku by putting two and two together and taking a walk, not in Buenos Aires, but down the Janpath ... If only!

        But just as the Bofors guns refuse to fall silent, so do bomb- laden jihadis. The country has lost count of the bomb blasts in recent past with the indigenous terror industry, having achieved self-sufficiency, 'booming' in sync with the economy. Of course, the nation has been assured that a thousand blasts can derail a thousand trains but not the peace process. So this time around, when a few bogies of the Friendship Express were blasted, the usual platitudes were mouthed, the usual charges were traded and then it's business as usual, a diplomatic break between blasts. And as usual the number of the actual dead and the number of the acknowledged dead will not tally, making the rising body count of terror victims as incalculable as in Baghdad. And rescuers, as there, claim that they are no longer counting bodies, but body parts. Now is this peace process or piece-process?

        The Chennai Corporation poll is a unique arithmetic. Any which way you add up, the result is 'fixed', having been designed by rationalists. And talking of fixing and fixtures, the people and punters alike of Bharat are into hectic calculations on the World Cup in the Windies. Apart from the official millions, a parallel betting business, worth probably more, is thriving gloriously. But for the cricket obsessed multitudes, for whom the next month and a half is clearly off official calendars, it is the statistics on field that would count. And with the 'Leftist' from Bengal upsetting all past cricketing calculations, few dare hazard guesses.

        With such heady arithmetic around, can PC complain that his budget fell flat on TRP in just 24 hours? Then where would Lalu, whose Railway budget lasted just a few hours on the tube, go for consolation?