Budget dinner talk between the PM and the FM
17 Mar 2012
After several stressful weeks of preparing the budget and finally presenting it, finance minister Pronabda gratefully accepted the invitation from his boss and good friend Manmohan Singh for dinner at No 10 (no, not Downing Street), Race Course Road.
The intelligence sleuths tasked with tapping every conversation in every government building, and some private buildings in Delhi, recorded their conversation and allowed it to be leaked to the news channels.
If only to show yet again that sleuths listen to everything, even at the prime minister's residence. Here are the excerpts from the dinner conversation between the prime minister and the finance minister on budget day.
Manmohan: Good to have you for dinner my friend. You must be tired. How do you feel?
Pronab: Oh, don't ask. You have been there, you know the drill. It was a lot easier in the '80s when we had none of these TV studio experts telling us what to do. But you were at the RBI and the Planning Commission when I was the minister under Rajivji, weren't you? Even when you became the minister in the '90s, it must have been easier. Anyway, thank you for hosting me.
Manmohan: We are not getting any younger, are we? We only had to answer a few questions from some of these old editor types. These days people ask too many questions, just like the nuclear NGO's I mentioned last month. I am thinking of asking PC to find out if these people receive any American or European money to ask questions about fiscal deficits too.
