Of Budget speech and the chamber of secrets

What’s common to the 2020 Budget speech and the feature film, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets? Both had the same running time: two hours and 40 minutes or a total of 160 minutes.The speech would have been longer than the box-office smash, but for union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s visible uneasiness which forced her to skip a few pages.The seemingly interminable speech gave the feel of watching a long-drawn Bollywood flick like Mughal-e-Azam (172 min) or Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi (163 min).The time Sitharaman took to speak 12,814 words was longer than the duration of a direct Delhi-Mumbai or a Delhi-Kolkata flight, which is roughly two hours and 10 minutes. In 160 minutes, you can probably travel to a stadium, watch an international hockey match and come back home.During this period, you could have heard all the 13 songs of The Beatles’s classic album, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (duration 39.22 min) four times over.Sitharaman broke her own record for the longest Budget speech which was delivered over two hours and 17 minutes in July 2019. Records, however, show that this wasn’t the most verbose speech ever.Manmohan Singh’s famous Budget speech of 1991 contained 18,077 words. Budget speeches of 1948, 1991, 1998 and 2014 were all wordier than Sitharaman’s presentation.The length of Sitharaman's speech was the subject of avid discussion on social media. Those who had kept track of the previous record were quick to point out that the FM had established a new record for the longest Budget presentation.This was immediately followed by observations on the quality of the speech. Those opposed to the Budget said that the duration of an address does not necessarily translate into the quality of its vision.However, some lauded Sitharaman’s marathon effort praising her “determination” and courage”.