How would your favourite dish taste if you forget to add masala in it? Pretty much lacklustre, dull and tasteless – right? Can you sell such a dish? Well 21st century modern India sells primarily on masala. Unless and until there is considerable amount of masala in your food, it won’t sell. And corruption is not only the spicy food, but has become the very pot in which your masaledar food is cooked.
In other words, corruption is the licence to sell the masaledar food. It is indispensable, ubiquitous and is often warranted by a hierarchy. There is a politics to it which demands you to be a witty player of the game. You cannot be a hero unless you make yourself a practitioner of corruption; or more importantly have a licence to practice the politics of corruption. In the least, you can pay heed to Khushwant Singh’s fantastic recipe on ‘how to be a star attraction’ in today’s world. He says -
“If you can’t dazzle your opponent by your wit, then bamboozle them with your bullshit.”
The modern era seems to have been rather bamboozled by the over-execution of wit. Manipulation, nepotism, cronyism is rampant. They are all flavours of corruption just as your masala is to your food. You want to make maximum optimal profits in no time, more than any maths or algorithm course can optimize. The greeneries of currency looks supreme than the sanctity of the ecology; the insatiable desire engenders gigantic disparity; honesty and simplicity remain confined to the mythological textbooks; and morality, values, ethics and innocence dis-appear, rather get vanquished.
Corruption shares a healthy relationship with the greed and insatiable desire of humankind. It discriminates, divides and sorts the rich and the poor. As an example, the rich prefers to remain exposed as a signature of salaciousness, status and class; while the poor remains under-dressed. Both are devoid of attire but for entirely opposite reasons. As a matter of fact - 46 per cent of the malnourished children of the world—of whom at least 75,000 die every month—are in India. Another alarming official statistic—36 per cent of Indians live on less than Rs. 20 a day; with the menace of corruption pegging at Rs 1,555 thousand crores in the last decade.
The tank of wealth is leaking and overflowing at few places sans any distribution / percolation to the much weaker sections of society. What transpires is we have taller buildings but shorter tempers; wider highways, but narrower viewpoints. We have more degrees but less sense, more knowledge, but less judgment; more experts, yet more problems; more medicine, but less wellness. We have multiplied our possessions, but reduced our values. These are the times of fast foods and slow digestion, big men and small character, steep profits and shallow relationships. These are the days of two incomes but more divorces. These are days of quick trips, disposable diapers, throwaway morality, one night stands, overweight bodies, and pills that do everything from cheer, to quiet, to kill. It is like you have so much in the showroom window and nothing in the stockroom.
I think globalization and modernization has imported a new disease that of ‘instant’anization. Today, you have programmes with instant results –viz. instant yoga, instant Samadhi, instant vocab builder, instant masala for cooking and many more. This instantaneous approach is also a grave party to the birth of corruption. The quality is compromised with money, inefficiency and hollowness.
Today, no one claims to be ordinary, for it is the epoch of extra-ordinary events – right from the CWG and 2G scams to the “Murdochization” of Indian news and some media-channels including Ms Radia, the Olympic winner’s dope scandal, the recurring blasts, the illegal mining, an unresponsive and clueless government, Tihar’s VIP inmates, same political battles and tu-tu mein-mein between political parties on National TV channels. UPA-II has been pre-occupied in combating the scams it has been greeted with and futilely changing ministerial portfolios with very little on concrete developmental grounds.
So if you wish to be an extra-ordinary sensation, all you have to do is to engine a scam successfully, failing so can land you in Tihar. Even if you miss out on the wits, simply a reasonable pocket-load and a reasonable political nexus can befriend you with corruption – the licence to buy any damn thing. Neeraj Grover became a huge sensation recently – the murder, the judgement, the accused, the accomplice, the media melodrama. A new film on the enigmatic man by a notorious producer and a reality soap-opera pregnant with Maria Susairaj becomes another new sensation to this sensation. In this series of sensations, the common citizens also play a role but of mute spectators.
Lokpal created a huge debate of late. Not that it is something new. It was first introduced in the parliament of India in 1968 and subsequently brought to table 9 times thereafter. But it never passed its examination at the hands of our elected representatives. It is a pity to see a high resourceful country governed out of lustful desires and nepotism. It is even more a pity to see the able civil servants – the IAS, the IPS fall at the merciful prey of the system ruled by political black-sheep. A couple of months back I saw a very encouraging competition in DAIICT which demanded solutions to corruption. Unfortunately I don’t see a concrete, clear, feasible, sweeping and sure-shot solution to corruption. I guess Lokpal is a very solid beginning in this regard. It remains to see how it gets implemented to ensure a relatively less corrupt and a cleaner, a civilized sustainable society.
