Today when I went to the petrol pump to fill my car, the pump fellow happily announced to me that petrol was free if I was going to the mall. He insisted on it, saying he wouldn’t charge me anything if I went there.

Puzzled, I asked how he would know, so he promptly slapped a tracking device on my car and said the device would report where I went. I was offended, so I asked him to remove it, but he shook his head and declined. “You see sir, my deal with the mall is that I have to give you free petrol if you go there, because they will pay me four times the going rate and it’s too good a deal for me to refuse. Therefore I need this tracking device to know where you went. You have no choice.” So of course I yelled at this fellow and asked him what business he had minding where I went.

If the mall wanted to give me free petrol, they could reimburse me when I went to the mall. Who was this petrol fellow to dictate terms? I refused to take his petrol and went looking for the next pump.

Now since petrol is a scarce resource, the government rationed licenses and and only four companies were authorised to sell petrol. All the Petrotel pumps were insisting on this free petrol scheme, so I went looking for a Vodarol pump. Hopefully they had good sense. Unfortunately, I heard the bad news on the radio news report. Petrotel’s scheme was a success. Too many drivers were so mesmerised by the idea of free petrol that they figured no one would notice if they drove their car to the mall, parked in the basement, then walked the remaining few kilometres to their office. The malls didn’t mind because they were having record footfalls. Vodarol was so envious of Petrotel that they had also introduced this free petrol scheme. My only options were to go to the third contractor, Gasea, which only had pumps in the outskirts because they were too poor to get land in the middle of the city, or the government pump Bharat Airavat Business Unit (BABU), which the government said existed to prevent the others from coming up with such ridiculous schemes.

Because the government had no idea how to actually operate a petrol pump, they didn’t know when to fill up their tanks and were usually empty, so it was pointless going there anyway. The only two pump companies that knew how to supply petrol were no longer interested in my money because they got more money by selling me to the mall.

End of story.