Coconuts, Birdwatching and the Lost Art of a Free Sunday

Sunday was meant to be simple. A quiet morning, binoculars dusted off, perhaps a short drive to a lake where the birds, blissfully unaware of fiscal arithmetic, would go about their business with admirable discipline. Instead, the day was surrendered to the Union Budget, a document that promised aspiration, kartavya, and reform, and delivered coconuts, turtle trails, and an unexpectedly encyclopaedic interest in birdwatching.

Budgets, it is often said, are not meant to excite. Fair enough.

Yet Budget 2026 managed something rarer, it exhausted without alarming, disappointed without offending, and consumed an entire Sunday without offering even the consolation of a clear macro surprise. If this was a test of endurance, it was passed quietly.

The rhetoric came early and generously. Kartavya framed everything, three of them no less, arranged with moral clarity and narrative confidence. Growth would be accelerated, aspirations fulfilled, inclusion ensured. It sounded serious, weighty, and necessary. One settled in, coffee in hand, expecting the numbers to do their part. They mostly did not. What followed was less a demand-boosting intervention and more a guided tour of India’s productive landscape, with frequent stops at sectors that will matter deeply, sometime between now and 2047.

There was infrastructure, to be fair, plenty of it. Corridors, connectors, waterways, and rail lines raced across the speech. City Economic Regions appeared, promising agglomeration benefits that economists admire and commuters may one day experience. Manufacturing received its ritual encouragement, semiconductors, chemicals, rare earths, capital goods.

 All important, all long-dated, all immune to the impatience of markets looking for next quarter’s impulse.

And then the Budget began to wander.

Coconuts made an appearance, earnest and proud, complete with a scheme to replace old trees. Cashew and cocoa followed, with global branding ambitions. Sandalwood sought restoration of its former glory. Walnuts, almonds, pine nuts, agar trees, each took their turn. Somewhere between coconut saplings and pine nut density, one began to suspect that the Budget had been drafted with admirable ecological sensitivity but limited regard for the Sunday it would consume.

Tourism was not far behind. Birdwatching trails were announced, turtle trails too, both undoubtedly worthy. One could almost hear the irony rustling in the reeds. Instead of actually watching birds, citizens were watching allocations for watching birds. Instead of a walk outdoors, there was a long sit indoors, parsing whether the agglomeration benefits of a City Economic Region would someday make reaching the lake easier.

Each scheme, taken in isolation, makes sense. Rural incomes matter. Tourism employs. Biodiversity deserves protection. The problem was not intent, but scale and timing. This was a Budget delivered at a moment when growth is steady but uneven, consumption hesitant, private investment selective, and global conditions anything but benign. Expectations had quietly built that demand would be nudged, sentiment soothed, markets acknowledged. What arrived instead was discipline, continuity, and an implicit reminder that patience is also a virtue.

Even the external world barely intruded. Trade tensions, tariffs, global uncertainty, they were acknowledged politely, then ushered aside. The real drama was domestic and procedural. No tax relief for investors. Higher transaction costs for traders. A borrowing programme that reminded bond markets that arithmetic still matters. This was not a Budget that tried to please. It was one that chose to proceed.

By late afternoon, the speech concluded, the markets sulked, and Sunday was gone. The birds, presumably, had a fine day. The coconuts will have their moment, in time. The turtle trails will be walked, eventually. The City Economic Regions will be mapped, studied, and debated. All of it will matter, later.

What was lost was something smaller and harder to quantify, the feeling that a Budget day might still surprise, still shock, still decisively shift the cycle. Instead, it reaffirmed a truth we have been circling for years. This is an era of management, not stimulus; of committees, not coups; of corridors, not cliff-edges.

Perhaps that is kartavya too. But next year, one might just skip the live speech, go birdwatching instead, and read the Budget later, preferably on a weekday, when coconuts feel less personal. End