Do I have to tell what subject she blogs on? Yes it’s a food blog. And I was ready to confer the title of chef to her because her weekend cooking is pretty good. The only thing I am not happy about is the photographs. For some reason she does not want me to shoot those pictures in my camera. She sticks to her point and shoot. We should do something about it soon.
Do check out http://chefhema.wordpress.com
Update:
Filed my return on time after paying the due taxes “FINALLY’ arrived at my auditor. Thanks to online tax payment and online return filing process, gone are the days when people were forced to stand in long queues.
I am back from discussing with my auditor who takes care of my tax issues. Maybe it is just me, but i am having a hard time with the auditors for the second year in a row.
My expectation is that I will submit all my details well in advance. I expect my auditor to clearly do all the calculations and spell out my tax liability. And be able to answer my questions, if any.
Last year, I consulted an auditor in Madurai, who was not a Chartered Accountant. Let us just say he is the lodge vaithiyar equivalent in the auditor fraternity. He coolly classified my mom’s family pension as ‘Salary income’. I just happened to be awake at the wrong time and searched google, so caught this mistake.
So this year, I caught hold of a proper Chartered Accountant. But this year was even more interesting. I had bought and sold a bunch of shares. There are capital gains and capital loss. And within these
there are two sub categories - long term and short term. For a grand total of eleven stocks, it would take hardly a day to figure out the net tax liability. But the reality is, i gave all the details three weeks back, and am still waiting to get an error free statement.
It is not that the auditor does not know. It is just that he asks his articled clerk to do the work, who obviously is learning. First, he had the dates wrong for about 4 transactions. He entered 2008 as 2009. Some had a sale transaction date mentioned ‘Nov 12 2010′. Some had the buy date later than the sale date, even when i had sold all the shares of that company.
But I would not blame the articled clerk, I would blame the auditor for not verifying the details. I have already traveled back and forth to Vadapalani area twice for this purpose. First I was told I had to pay 8000 rupees tax later when I probed, I figured a loss was entered as a profit, the dialogue came to ‘ 4000 rupees tax, sir’ , which later came to ‘2000 rupees tax’ and eventually ‘no tax liability’.
What if I had nil tax knowledge and had just blindly believed these folks? I would’ve paid 8000 Rs. tax unnecessarily. How many semi-literate small business men are like this in our country who will rely solely on the auditor? I totally detest that cavalier attitude.
I came back home, asking him to prepare a revised, error free statement so that I can file the return online myself.
And tomorrow is the last date to file the Income tax return for individual tax payer. ‘Beware the auditor, for they know a lot more than you in tax matters, and so can make more mistakes’ has been my lesson till now.
Coming to think of it, I think there are some professions For e.g. science, medicine - neuro surgery, aircraft pilot etc, where an amateur does not stand a chance, and we just have to have that faith in the expert. On the other hand, in commercial and legal matters, we as consumers of professional services should do our own due diligence to avoid being taken for a ride.
There is a hot debate happening in NEEYA NAANA even as I write this - money minded doctors. To me the one book which would really be a benchmark on the corruption in the medical field would still be POSTMORTEM published by VIKATAN. To put it bluntly, most of these so called talk shows sound shallow and mokkai to me.
If some one pays Rs. 1 crore for an MD Seat in Radiology, he should be out of his mind if he is not money minded.
The only reason I watched today’s episode was because if the presence of Jeyamohan. But he too sounded far more like a ‘trade unionist’ than a yadhartha vaadhi…
There was this field worker who partly blamed the doctors for the 2,50,000 farmer suicides in Vidharba.
He could’ve just as well blamed anybody and it would still be appropriate - the bankers who did not extend credit, the poor law enforcement systems, the policies by the government, etc.
None of the controversial practices by the doctors were actually discussed and no requests to stop some of the practices was put forth. For example, why should doctors have a particular medical shop name in his letter pad? Why should a doctor see the representative from Ranbaxy or Dr. Reddys? Why does the representatives dole out free samples to the doctors? Why are doctors given television sets when he attains a target of prescribing a certain drug? Any mokkai student of psychology will tell these are powerful tools of influence used by the drug companies to manipulate the doctors. So long as the doctors are going to benefit by it, they are not going to mind it (because they are not saints) and so long as these tools are effective, the drug companies are not going to stop it. There is a problem, but the problem is in the entire ecosystem, not just one component of it. It was irony that one of the employee from a pharma company was quick in blaming the doctors.
The average doctor is as likely to be money minded as an average policeman, or the average auto driver, or the lawyer, or a bureaucrat. They are as much representative of the society they are part of. To assume any other way sounds far removed from reality.
Here would be my approach:
- Increase the number of medical colleges - private and public. For a country of 1+bilion people, how many reputed medical institutes do we have? pathetically poor.
- Pharma companies should be banned from meeting the doctors personally. There should be other ways to get feedback from the doctors community as a whole but certainly not on a one to one level. Whoever does not understand this should be made to read on ‘Reciprocity’ in Robert Cialdini’s book ‘INFLUENCE’.
- Doctors should be banned from having some fancy medical stores names and dignostics names in their letter pad. A patient should be able to get any medicine from any pharmacist. It goes without saying that pharmacist should be stopped from seeing the doctors.
- No ban will work unless the incentives are strong - both positive and negative. Just make the practice of ‘interacting with pharma representatives’ equivalent to Section 498a. People should be taken to police station on a ‘no questions asked’ basis for sometime.
Of course not even one idea to make things better was discussed in that talk show.
Bottom line, the age-old formula of categorizing one section of the people and targeting them as a whole has worked again from an entertainment perspective. The media can again position itself as the guardian of people’s rights. The social workers can use the opportunity to blame everything and anything - that is easy part, try coming up with solutions that work for all. For every corporate hospital which charge Rs. 300 for a simple consultation, there are several Dr. Thangaraj’s of Velachery who do service for Rs. 40 till late into the night.
I think there is an average median income that the urban middle class society has in mind for themselves. Any lucky profession which seems to make more than that will come under fire in due course. All sorts of morality questions will be asked. They will be targeted in talk shows.
On the other end of the spectrum, most of the duty doctors (mere MBBS grads) still work for a pittance when compared to the software crowd. While sales representatives from pharma companies can go about minting more money than the doctors even while complaining ‘Che.. doctors rombo mosam’.
My mom likes to watch all these talk shows. I can’t stand it nowadays.