In what is perhaps his finest book, Flaubert’s Parrot, the English writer Julian Barnes asks: “Isn’t the most reliable form of pleasure, Flaubert implies, the pleasure of anticipation?” Gustave Flaubert was a French novelist who lived in the nineteenth century and who is most famous for his debut novel, Madame Bovary – or, if you are a 1990s film buff, Maya Memsaab – featuring Deepa Sahi and Shah Rukh Khan, before he became the Shah Rukh Khan.

In this week leading to the union budget, which will be presented on February 1, there is a lot of anticipation amongst people who tend to follow such things – the business media, the business lobbies, the stock market wallahs, the think tankiyas, the corporate economists and so on. Expectations are piled high – of tax relief, higher government spending and other growth-boosting measures.

The real question, though, is whether this anticipation will translate into real pleasure, given the constraints facing the union budget, the Indian economy and India’s place in an increasingly volatile and fragmented global order.

Let’s start with the stock market wallahs – or those in the business of managing other people’s money (OPM). They are, as usual, hallucinating and trying to sell us the moon, even though the BSE Sensex – India’s most followed stock market index – has fallen close to 5 percent since its all-time closing high in late September 2024. Sixteen months on, fixed deposits have delivered better returns than stocks on average.