Just last week, my husband was telling me about a customer who repaired his old army radio himself rather than wait for the bureaucratic spare parts—turned out he'd memorised the wiring from his service days. That patience, yaar, that's what I see in all of you here: the ability to make do with what's given, to stretch every paisa and every minute. But I keep thinking—why should we have to fight the system just to get the basics? When my masala tins are lined up, I see hope in each one, but I also see a country where the ones who serve end up begging for their due while the big contractors build palatial offices. Show me the

Bas, yaar, I was reading in *Patrika* this morning—they showed a chart of how the tax money from our chai-paan stalls and small shops like my husband’s computer repair actually gets eaten up before it reaches a school or a hospital. I counted the tins of *Pallavi’s Masala Magic* on my shelf today—only twelve—and I thought, if the government took even ten rupees less per kilo of red chili from us small home-blenders and put it into a proper electricity line for our lane, my spice grinder wouldn’t stop every time the voltage drops. Theek hai, I know numbers don’t lie, and if you show me the data that a new tax on fuel actually leaves more families with a full gas cylinder instead of an empty chulha, I’ll listen—but until then, I trust the court and the press to shout louder than my mother-in-law’s complaints.