An open letter to Mr. Jaitley- You need to revert the taxation on PF withdrawals

Dear Mr. Jaitley,

I thank you and your team for giving us the budget that our country needed with maximum focus on making it pro-poor and pro-farmer. I understand the new taxation and increase in levies and surcharge, which was mostly on luxury items and not on the items that poor or lower middle class people need, will help in taking our country forward.

However, your decision to tax the PF withdrawals on maturity was not something I could see benefiting the middle class. You will agree with me that a large part of this middle class is made of salaried people. These people who fight daily with life to offer a better life to their children. PF has always been one of their weapons in this fight. A 'brahmastra' if you may. One only uses it when one has lost all other options and most of the times, they need every penny out of it. By taxing 60% of the withdrawals, you tend to take away a chunk of that money from them.That money which could have helped a 3rd grade employee save his child who is hospitalised or a 4th grade employee in providing fees for her daughter's education or probably someone who needed it for the funeral of his father. At maturity many times the PF is used by an employee to buy a house for his/her family, a place of their own, which he/she was never able to buy.

By taxing that, you tend to snatch away a part of their dreams or hit another nail in the soul of that already wounded warrior who has fought life with all his/her might. It is a request that you do not do so. Please revert this particular taxation and let the middle class live in the comfort of the thought that they have that 'brahmastra'. Please let them have their weapon.

Regards,

Kumar Aditya,

An ordinary citizen,

India

Lucky day

It was a lucky day. 
I took an Ethiopian Airlines flight from Mumbai on Sunday to come back to Kampala. I had to change planes at Addis Ababa. When the flight took off from Mumbai, I started reading a novel. After reading it for about two hours, I closed the book, put it in the seat-pouch in front of me and slept. 
In Addis Ababa, I changed my flight and sat on my window seat of the flight that was to bring me to Kampala. After sometime, through the window, I saw a book in the hands of the luggage assistant who was working on the ground. I realized I had left my novel in the previous flight. I resigned to the fate and considered the novel gone. Loss of a book means a lot to me and I had only read a few chapters of it. I was desolate.
I looked at the luggage assistant. He was turning the book in his hand. I realized the book had a strong resemblance to my novel. After a hard look of a couple of minutes I could say with a high degree of certainty that it was the same novel even if it was not mine.
I called the stewardess and asked if she could check out with the assistant? I gave her my previous seat number, the name of the novel, the writer and how I had left the book. She assured me that she would check.
They were a few anxious minutes. I saw the stewardess coming. I came to the aisle seat in anticipation. She came to me with the book in hand and asked me if it's the same book. There it was, with the spot at the back where I had ripped the sticker off from.
I couldn't thank the staff enough.

The novel: The Scarletti Inheritance
The writer: Robert Ludlum smile emoticon
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