Neither credible nor significant

Over the years, especially with the arrival of 24-hour TV news channels and the desperate hunger for bytes, the run-up to the Union Budget as well as the Budget itself has acquired all the trappings of a mega event. With some budgets, at the end of the day, one has often wondered if the event was “full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing” as the old Bard of Stratford-upon-Avon might have put it. But there are also budgets that do not even evoke a sound, let alone fury.