Saturday, September 3, 2011

India Against Corruption!!!!--???


Disclaimer(Alert ) = Serious Post tending towards philosophy.

A great uprising. People say that after freedom fight for the first time such a fervor has been seen in people of our country. Mood was no different in campus. Marches, human-chains and fasts. A great scene of social awakening. To make the stand clear i also am against corruption, well who want. This is converted into fad. So let’s introspect for a minute what exactly is corruption? It is what the politicians and people in government do something like hoarding money, abuse of power and.... all the wrong things. Good definition. Okay so we are the victims, we are the people suffering from corruption so the other person is corrupt and not us. But what really does the "US" consist of. Us is the common man, us is the person who wakes up every morning to work because he knows he just can’t sit and enjoy the day for making the ends meet or may be because his boss will be furious if he does not turn up. ‘Us’ is the person who opens his shop every day and sells good. ‘Us’ is everywhere then who is them. Until a police or a ticket checker does not put on his uniform he is a part of ‘US’ and as soon as he does he has become them. This could be fare but going a bit deeper it does not seem totally correct. Something is wrong... What if we were in the place of that policemen whose salary is less than a fresh graduate from a college and whose daughter is pushing him for buying a new dress and his son wants a new bike, he wants them to have the best of the world but just because he was stuck in a job which he thought would be good he just can no longer afford to provide them a good standard of living. Wait may be i am justifying corruption, no i am not i just want to show the deeper issue in considering a bill passed shall wipe-out all the corruption in the country. Issue is not about our will to act we surely will act and stop paying bribes and do whatever it takes on our part. But it is not an economical issue its more of a social issue and even worst a psychological issue. I throw a question at you, let say you are stuck on a platform without a ticket, no train ticket no platform ticket nothing whatsoever. Your parents, your friends, your girlfriend or say someone important is waiting for you and this is the last train. The queue is long, very long. Train is about to leave in 5 minutes. Will you board it or leave it?? Whatever your answer would be i know the temptation of boarding is something very hard to resist. Eventually some of you may return but you would be heartbroken. For those who boarded the train would tap your own shoulder for pulling off a great adventure of travelling without ticket. One more question, how many of you will present yourself to the Ticket checker on your own and ask him to penalize you for what you have done. Even worst you are short on cash and he tells by law you need to be handed over to police on next station. So you boarding train was a utterly useless and worse decision than returning. How are you feeling now? Seems very real situation, one that would have happen to someone around you. Mostly people would have got off passing down few bucks. Some people have eventually made it a practice to travel this way, leave alone travelling people have made corruption a part of life. This people are common people in and around us, this people are you and me. They are part of this system. Okay so i have proved the cliché point that we are the part of this corrupt system. It’s we who have to change to stop it from happening but what if you knew that the ticket checker needed that extra sum of money from you because he wanted to pay fees for his children school and he has someone seriously ill home and he is low on income. Now what? This is turning out to be a tough test. The issue is not about corruption it’s about the state of affairs. It’s about so many inter connected things that just concentrating on one and leaving others to take care of themselves will result in an utter failure of one system or other. See this is not as simple as it sounds. Now let’s get to one very subtle point which has been harassing me ever since this corruption struggle started.

India is economically very diverse country. Few people live in conditions where getting potable water and one time of food is impossible while others stay in apartments so large to be called as palaces and have sumptuous meals cooked in mineral waters. Wait.... i am talking like a communist here but no i believe in democracy and i trust that’s the way ahead. What my point is that we pay extra money for getting services and comfort while there are fellow beings that are living in a pathetic state. Just because we have money to buy those comforts and it is legal to buy them because it is not called corruption it is called capitalism. What if putting up AC in your house was illegal because it takes up too much electricity and there are areas where we do not have enough power supply. What if maintaining a swimming pool in summer was illegal because there was not enough water for people to drink in some part of country. What if during your birthday bash it was illegal to waste food because someone somewhere was sleeping tonight without having dinner because he could not afford to have it. Just because you can afford to do it does not mean you should. I again seem to be taking up a very rubbish topic in a very different post. But just step back and think. Think about the people below poverty line in our country. For them we are the corrupt people just consuming all the resources and making it difficult for them to sustain every single day. What’s the difference between a politician who wants extra comfort because of his power and us who want to have special treatment because we have extra money? Corruption is not then an issue of them it’s an issue about ‘US’. It’s us who are not just a party to it but a whole and sole part of it. 

Think about it??