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What is Corruption?

It is good that Indians of all hue [white, green and black] and geography are coming out to raise their voice against corruption. At least it is a significant deviation from the typical behavior of looking the other way or sometimes not even noticing an anomaly!

So, what this means is, large sections of people are feeling cheated by the large scale and institutionalized commissions and omissions. We are feeling the heat and for once want to give it back to those who are apparently generating it.

But what is this thing called ‘corruption’ and where does it come from? My understanding corruption is simply the ugly side of the coin called convenience. The urge to let convenience bypass our values. To honk and scare away a passerby or a co-user of a public road, to jump a queue, to pay 500 rupees extra to an agent get a train ticket – knowing fully well he will grease the ticket position up, to want a subordinate to suck-up and wait for us for a meeting, to not let another person complete what he is saying, to want the class teacher to show a little bit of uncalled for preference over others, to not dispose the empty Lays packet in a bin, or much worse still to dump the contents of the household bin in the neighbourhood alley - these and many other actions [at family, work and community levels] which we will frown if we are at the receiving end but which we can conveniently justify it we end up indulging in them ourselves.

These are all the seeds of corruption. The moment we sell our ‘values’ to jump the queue in lieu of being patient or even in lieu of missing a train [what will be the downside any way, if we miss a train – the sky will not fall] or when we are happy [nah, read comfortable!- not happy] to have been inadvertently given a benefit we didn’t deserve – we have got corrupt and have encouraged others to be corruptible.

Corruption is a social psyche. The corrupt practices of the people in office or power is just a manifestation of a social psyche to be better off than what we deserve to be [people grease palms to be better off and people let palms be greased to be better off]. It is a justification of convenience, encouraged by the justification of life. Yes, we are all entitled to life and self-dignity, but dignity is different from comforts and convenience.

We are all corrupt and corruption, like it or not, – at least in Indian society – is introduced into the minds of every child at a young age. It is in every person and every family [of course to different degrees].

So, if we are all aghast at the talk of corruption and we want to make a change. I suggest lets start with ourselves. To quote Gandhiji, ‘lets be the change that we want to see in the society…’ Everyone who goes to the morchas – may first take a self vow to not get induced to corrupt practices. If this seems a tall order, then let us take a vow to not indulge in corrupt practices one day a week [one day of detox diet! or the pure veg diet]. Well, at least when we are the morcha. That can be a great starting point.

Not being corrupt would mean, showing character over convenience. It would mean confronting one’s own comfort zones to give someone else their due – even at the expense of personal convenience. Only then can we armed with due courage and character to actually be the harbingers of change. Let us stop, wait and watch ourselves. Let us introspect and enhance our Spiritual Quotient as we double our efforts to change the policy makers.

Corruption can be tackled in one generation if we go to the roots of it and uproot it. Lets make a small beginning within ourselves and enjoy the beauty of that small change add up to become a revolution.

Jai Hind!

Bhubaneshwar
August 16, 2011
Ps: Noteworthy, unless we can root corruption from ourselves – then we will always have Laloo Raj. Like in Animal Farm – every Modi or Nitish or maybe Naveen will go the West Bengal route. Maybe Laloo also had ideals when he took charge, like the same way the Communists at Writers Building had when they dismantled Sid Ray. Or the way Indira G probably had in the early 1960’s.

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