Budget 2014: FM Arun Jaitley's speech was very long with a lot of prose and no poetry

Five days ago, a group of BJP policy wonks met Arun Jaitley. Their job was to put forward what they wanted to see in the Budget speech: no poetry, no quotes from great personalities of history, no colour. It was a conscious decision. "We didn't see the point," said one of these prosaic worthies while waiting to congratulate the finance minister after his maiden speech.

So there were no lines from the Upanishads, nothing from the Arthashashtra. Not even that chestnut-cum-cliché, Tagore's 'Where the mind is without fear…' In other words, Jaitley provided no relief – apart from the 7-minute '5-minute' break from dry number crunching. Not one wisecrack to make Parliament break into a smile either Pranab Mukherjee had been fond of the great Kautilya.

Manmohan Singh liked his Iqbal and Victor Hugo. P Chidambaram made Tamil sage Thiruvalluvar famous in the northern climes. The only 'words of wisdom' Jaitley made in his speech was his exhortation: "One only fails when one stops trying." Those words, in fact, proved prescient for the minister, as he was forced to deliver the second half of his 2 hour 15 minutes speech sitting down because of a bad back pain.

After asking Speaker Sumitra Mahajan for a short break, Jaitley became the independent India's first sitting finance minister. He completed his rather dry and long 'haystack' speech, taking frequent sips of sugared water (his sugar levels being low) even as he announced a hike in aerated drinks.

Clearly, the man was soldiering on. If his speech lacked the purple and the sagacious, figures jumped about like Disney characters. One figure in particular — Rs 100 crore was a particular favourite. He uttered the wholesome amount as many as 29 times as his favourite quantum of funds devoted to various schemes.

The scattering of the 'sau kror's was wideranging and included the Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao Yojana (Save the Girl, educate the Girl Scheme), madrasa modernization, Kisan TV, a war museum and memorial, a sports university in Manipur and a National Mission on Pilgrimage Rejuvenation and Spiritual Augmentation Drive.

Was there any particular reason for Jaitley's fondness for this round figure? One explanation put forward by the finance minister's team is that it was meant to be a "shagun ka allocation" -- a token amount to kickstart things.

The only major project that escaped this 100 crore group hug was the memorial statue of Sardar Patel. This 'Statue of Unity' received double the amount: Rs 200 crore. No shagun ka allocation here.

A doctor from the prime minister's medical team was waiting in the FM's office after the speech. Delivering the speech was just the beginning of Budget Day for the man with a bad back. After Parliament, Arun Jaitley would be on television channels trying to drive home the fact that he hadn't been spineless at all on Budget Day.