India Against Corruption (IAC) vs. India For Corruption (IFC)

It may sound rather puerile, but this is what it’s been reduced to: India against Corruption (IAC) vs. India for Corruption (IFC). The battle lines are firmly drawn, the big question is: Can IAC worst IFC; Can the new, emerged society beat back the entrenched, morally-derelict, value-free old; and will it, finally, be a triumph of transpacracy over kleptocracy?

Transpacracy is the flavour of our times, at least in emerged countries believing in the End-of-History ‘ism’. It is nothing but transparent democracy where the rule of law plays out in plucky openness, leveraging technology of a world-wide-web as harbinger of a just social order.

Much has been made out of the tyranny of the unelected and unelectable few over the elected and electable representatives. Also, the fact that the Constitution admits of law-making by the parliament is beyond question. But, paradoxically, it’s in the interstices of these two propositions that the solution to the present scourge of corruption lies.

First: the unelected and unelectable tyranny of the few. It is well to remember that these so-called few are the rightful citizens of this country conveying people’s angst and anguish. The support that Anna Hazare’s fast generated cannot be wished away. Were one to discount that too, the issues that this tyrannical group purveys cannot be overlooked. The issues are simple: Must we continue with this retinue of corruption that refuses to go away and raises its ugly head with monotonous regularity? Mustn’t we’ve a strong and autonomous institutionalized mechanism in place to curb such future desecrations?

The answer is simple: YES. For no social compact agreed upon by individuals coming off their free will to improve their lot enjoins a situation that their elected representatives loot their money in their selfish quest to fatten themselves at the cost of the very people for whose improvement they purportedly were elected. Further, must the vast majority allow the continuance of this desecration because they’ve committed the folly of voting them to power till their term gets over? The answer is a ringing NO.

The second issue – of parliament’s supremacy to legislate – flows from the former. While it’d be facetious to question the noble intent of members of the Constituent Assembly, it’s certain that they didn’t envisage situations when MPs and central ministers would be incarcerated for acts of gross commission. Nor could they have imagined that the people’s representative would make a career out of public service to lord the people over palm and pine. Remember, these members of the Constituent Assembly were people who had suffered incalculably to free the country, sacrificing comfort, profession and life, for a transcendental, national cause.

The arrogance and hauteur of most of these so-called people’s representatives must be seen to be believed. To call them public servants whose job it is to serve the public would be an offence to English language. To imagine that they’ll discharge their ministerial responsibilities to do good turn selflessly for public good would be asking for the moon. The impulse and the jockeying to occupy ministerial berths have been well documented in the infamous Niira Radiagate. Failing such ascendancy to ministerial high berths, those who are made to settle for lesser perches, try to make the most of the crumbs offered them. Their arrogance and hubris is legendary as is their impulse to high living – as though they are the lord and master who can brook no rule of the land and law.

Now take your pick. Whether we must allow the tyranny of the elected to continue ad nauseam or we must voice our opinion on public issues to straitlace public transactions. “Eternal vigil is the price of freedom,” Nehru, the quintessential democrat had once enjoined. His words ring true more than ever before. We need to banish the spectre of kleptocracy and an Orwellian raj.

Orwell though turns in his grave, smirking mischievously, unsure if his dictums are going to hold out in a world changing at cyberspeed and where untruths and hypocrisy are derided as unlovely relics of past opacity. He isn’t unhappy though, because he knows he’s won his fight – where war will be considered war, and not peace; ignorance condemned as ignorance, not knowledge; and freedom will be freedom, not slavery – where singlespeak trounces doublespeak and multispeak; and where human feelings find wings to take flight. 

Share

The Indian Babu's Social Darwinism

I still recall being bemused when an English friend once asked, “What ‘ism’ suffuses your administrators?” Recovering from the cargo of confusion, my quirky reply was in solemn undertone: “Socialistic capitalism,” and my mind still seeking a lattice of support from my disembodied ideas, had said from the corralling chaos, “capitalistic society sans pitfalls of marketplace!” Today, amid encircling corruption eddying around us, I’m happy my reply, blurted years ago, wasn’t entirely off-centre.

The recent news that the Empowered Group of Ministers headed by Finance Minister is toying with the idea of instructing investigative agencies to probe the wealth and income of 150 retired babus who joined as consultants, advisors, members of various boards or opened their own consultancy companies or took up direct or indirect jobs with India Inc and multinationals operating in India is doubtless the first move in independent India to look at bureaucrats’ umbilicals that invariably go beyond the obvious.

The decision follows the CBI’s discovery that many retired civil servants like the former Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of India chairman, former Telecom secretary and other senior officials have been connected post-retirement with various companies dealing with the telecom sector. The probe will cover bureaucrats of all hues, ex-chairmen and directors of Public Sector Undertakings and a few ex-Cabinet and Finance secretaries on the board of over dozen-odd big companies.

Though, it appears, none of these personnel faced corruption charges while in service, the government seems to have decided that officers who retired from the Ministries like Finance, Civil Aviation, Surface Transport, External Affairs, Petroleum, Tele-Communications, Commerce, Defence, and Public Sector banks, will come under the scanner. The modalities are yet to be finalized, the report says, yet it appears that various agencies like the CBI, CVC, Enforcement Directorate, and the Income Tax Department will be asked to collect information on babus dealing with infrastructure, real estate, power, mining, steel and aviation, and forward it to the Special Investigation Team set up following the Supreme Court intervention on black money.

Without insinuating any of these august luminaries on the EGoM radar, may one ask a simple question: why were they offered lucrative jobs in companies on retirement from government perches? It would be facetious to believe that their expertise to value-add products was the clincher. Rather more aptly, the post-retirement sinecures in companies mostly are reparative gestures for past services rendered when the babu held sway. There is another reason that complements the first: they become the active public relation face of the company in its myriad interface with the government. Mind you, the reward in the form of cost-to-company for such services is humongous. After all, there is a cost for making a senior retired government official do the errands in ministries and calling on his erstwhile juniors for favours!

A cursory glance at pre-retirement impulses of government officials is very amusing. Long years of acculturation in a system that has provided a lifestyle uniquely stately is on the verge of expiry. It hurts. A true blue-blooded bureaucrat therefore doesn’t wish to retire; he rather reinvents himself and adds a new tread to his already flattened self: he re-tyres no sooner he’s pensioned off. So this is the propitious time to build future foundation, with the imminent withdrawal of the edifice of perks and props looming large in his mind.

This, frankly, is very Darwinian, or to be exact, Social Darwinian – for the “cunningest” to linger on over perks, power, pelf. And, that’s when even the honest loses his honesty veneer; the burnishing sheen takes a pounding, in furious jockeying to land post-retirement sinecures. The quest is two-fold: post-retirement government and India Inc sinecures. This is when most intellectual dishonesties are perpetrated. It is a pathetic sight.

Given accusations of pliability, isn’t it time such carrots are altogether eliminated? Let all posts held post-retirement be held during period of active service: membership of Commissions, Tribunals, Regulatory Bodies, International/UN bodies or any else. And in corporate sectors, let there be a complete ban on employ in sectors the babu worked in in the last five years of his service.

Like Cassandra I’m tempted to prophecy evil and not be believed. His prophecy came true. I fervently hope my ideas have legs long and strong enough – to run for a bit. I still hope to believe!

Share

India and Transparency Revolution

            The defence minister, A. K. Antony, said it all, very aptly and very succinctly. India is going through a transparency revolution, he said, but not everyone is ready. This is the most honest statement to have come out from any important public functionary. His squeaky clean image could only have granted him the courage of conviction to say what, one reckons, is not the blasé and stereotypical refrain of a person in high perch. It is a rare, if also a very prescient, statement.

“Our country is passing through a transparency revolution. Walls of secrecy are crumbling gradually. But politicians, bureaucracy, judiciary, business people, armed forces and journalists are still not ready for this transition to transparency,” he said. The present logjam in the drafting of the Lokpal Bill needs to be looked at against this backdrop. It is not so much a fight between the Civil Society and the Government, but a fight between the Old Order and the New Concept. The Old Order refuses to change, not because it, like everything else, resists change, but because it knows that this change (in particular) is like nothing else in our nation’s memory; it is fraught with incalculable and dire possibilities –past, present and future.

Roll your mind back to an email doing the rounds in cyber world. “Indians are poor but INDIA is not a poor country,” says one of the Swiss Bank directors. He says that “280 lakh crore” of Indian money is deposited in Swiss banks which can be used for “tax-less” budget for 30 yrs. It can offer jobs to 60 crore Indians. It can help build 4-lane roads from any village to Delhi; it can provide free power supply to more than 500 social projects. Every citizen can be paid a monthly sum of Rs. 2000/- for 60 years. There is no need of World Bank and IMF loan. And: “We’ve full right to this corrupt money stashed abroad.”

If this is the past, the present too is not too inspiring for the Old Order. The apparitions of Kalmadi, Raja, and Kanimozhi, not to speak of the lesser lights, as these big fishes fry in Tihar in the height of Delhi summer, continue to haunt, ravage, and stalk popular imagination. Nor does the future hold any promise. The RTI has already made a serious dent, limiting public servants’ freewheeling dalliance – and, especially now with the magnum scams making them aware of potential future threat – were they to stray off the strait path. Any punitive action professionally imparted, with the time-tested influence-peddling to stall and dissipate charges missing, isn’t very appetizing. Therein lies the rub.

Typically, this is vintage Hegelian dialectic – the process to reconcile contradictions, in this case of historical processes and transitional inevitability. Future historians would note that the Defence Minister was clairvoyant in providing an answer before the die had been cast in Anno Domini 2011. “They’ll have to follow the transition and I don’t think anybody can take any step in a different direction,” he says. “You cannot stop this transparency revolution. It is percolating to all walks of life in India. That is the beauty of Indian democracy…Nothing is permanent in a democracy. Change is a must.”

            The spirit of the time goes against the Old Order. Today all-round, endemic corruption has been topped off by mega scams. The ever-enlarging phalanx of educated Indians, swelling outside the government employ and granting this new middle class legitimacy, is bristling at the quotidian corruption that it confronts. With disposable income-in-hand and with multiple hedonistic avenues available in an emerging economy, they are short on patience, brooking no roadblocks on their path they perceive is otherwise laden with good life. True, they may not understand the nitty gritty and nuances of the Lokpal Bill, but one thing they know: the way to future betterment lies in a corruption-free India. And this can never happen unless they too participate and make themselves counted. That explains why the youth rallied behind Anna Hazare during his Jantar Mantar fast in April 2011 and made the nation sit up and take note. India’s demographic dividend where youth is the lynchpin cannot be wished away.

Let’s examine the two important sticking points: Must the Lokpal embrace the Prime Minister and the higher judiciary? The Old Order still tenuously holds on to its antediluvian ideas to insulate these two categories from the searching eyes of transparency. If a Prime Minister under investigation is rendered hors de combat in running the country, a Chief Minister too would similarly be in his own State when under a cloud. In effect: while all are same in the eyes of the law, one, yes, is a tad higher – almost a colonial parody of I am George Nathaniel Curzon/A very superior person! And our parliamentary democracy patterned after the British model has drifted off from the essence of first among equals, primus inter pares!

Judiciary, higher or lower, is constituted of men from the same stock who populate every other service. Their DNA, thereby, is no different from others. In an ideally configured social contract envisioned through transaction of business rules, every service provider must render corruption-free service and do the work of his station that carries its inherent occupational hazards and allurements. This is as much applicable to the judiciary as to others. If every job is a job to be performed professionally, the retributions too should and must be similar. By similar the allusion is to transparency, fair play and level playing field.

It is well to remember that as events unfold – as indeed they already have – in India and as the inexorability of human will surges ahead, there is no holding back of history. A citizen roused is worse than a woman spurned. The New Concept of supremacy of the ordinary citizen has taken root. Yet these new ideas are nothing new. During the special session of parliament to commemorate 50 years of India’s Independence (26^th August-1^st September, 1997), a National Agenda to eradicate corruption, criminalization, casteism and communalism was adopted. Also, passed unanimously by both Houses of Parliament, was a resolution of a Second Freedom Struggle to implement the National Agenda. Today’s movement is only a re-averment of our past national resolve. Isn’t it time we gracefully accepted the remorseless march of history rather than obfuscate the issue with ideas that even fifteen years ago were thirty years out of date?

Share

Lokpal Must Remember the Axiom: Corruption = M + D - A

Anno Domini 2010-11 scams – CWG, Adarsh, 2G, Niira Radia(tion) – are every bit surreal and growing menacingly; each as unconscionable as the other – something modern India had never experienced before.
          By any facile definition, corruption is immoral, illegal, illicit, and illegitimate. Peel off the epidermis masking these semantics, and corruption surfaces as a crime of well-reasoned, well-conceived, cold immoral calculus. Individuals weigh the benefits and the costs of giving and taking bribes.

Shorn of attitudes, one can analyze systems in terms of their vulnerability to corruption. This is true both of the private and government sectors. Competition is less vulnerable to corruption than monopoly. Robert Klitgaard declaims, “Corruption is more pronounced in systems characterized by the formula C = M + D – A: corruption equals monopoly plus discretion minus accountability.”

Put the three magnum scams through this wringer. The CWG scam was due to the Organizing Committee doing what its high priest willed, giving the processes a slip. Discretion wasn’t spelt out, there was no accountability. It was banana republic at its worst.

The same with Adarsh: A criminal conspiracy where Discretion was the Dictator, and Accountability the Arch-Slave – hatched with breathless planning and flawless networking. The conspiracy threw up its own Monopoly. How else would one expect the high and mighty to hide behind the fig-leaf of Kargil martyrs! It was the greatest shame heaped on the armed forces whose chiefs and senior officers were caught in the buff.

The 2G Spectrum scam was indeed sui generis. With skeletons showing the unholy nexus between politicians-bureaucrats-corporate-media, it showed Monopoly and limitless Discretion with Accountability missing.

How may we begin? First, promote competition. But there would be monopolies that can’t be wished away: a nation’s natural and electromagnetic resources. When Monopoly is inevitable, Discretion must be circumscribed and made transparent, and Accountability must be total. In the case of 2G spectrum scam, Discretion far from being carefully delineated was given the freest run, and Accountability didn’t exist!

            It is importance that given human nature, there would be the impulse to improve one’s lot even when transactions are not legal. Consequently, officials will veer towards corruption when the ostensible gain from corruption far outstrips the penalty imposed times the probability of being caught and punished.

            How then must we limit corruption? It could be two-fold: Institutional mechanism and strong punitive action. Reduce monopoly to the limit possible, circumscribe discretion and temper it with transparency, and enhance accountability. Hong Kong’s Independent Commission Against Corruption is a super-body against corruption combining investigation, prevention, and popular participation.

            Then there is need for exemplary punitive action. Klitgaard suggests picking the low-hanging fruits and upsetting the applecart that promotes the reprehensible culture of impunity – to disabuse cynical citizen’s mind that is jaded and defeatist. Today, corruption is not only tolerated but has become a way of life.

The above suggestions presuppose heralding changes by simplifying laws, protocolizing procedures, and making processes transparent. What we have today is not lack of rules but surfeit of them; each caught up in woolly tangles making legal interpretations – and consequential adjudicatory processes endlessly long-winded – so infuriatingly exasperating that dares even to trivialize the constitutional office of the CAG.

The Big Three scams – CWG, Adarsh, 2G – of India Shaming have blessed us with material that makes for excellent case studies to educate ourselves. Given public outrage, they must form the cornerstone to cleanse the system from the cancer of corruption. Each scam could be analyzed threadbare with formulaic C = M + D - A to lay bare how the processes and systems were subverted, suborned and the nation deprived of its resources.

The Lokpal Panel must remember the above axiom while drawing up the Bill. With citizens demanding their right to corruption-free governance as their inalienable right, the public servants have to shore up their acts and perform. It is not merely financial honesty, but slowly as society casts its laser gaze on acts of omission and commission, this rarefied realm of moral and intellectual honesty would be placed under electron microscope. Silence, inaction, politeness, financial and sterile honesty wouldn’t do. The media – now bristling with righteous indignation – will tear into them. Hopefully, the dishonest and inept will run for cover much as the honest shall revel in their new-found luminance.

Share

Civil Services: My Very Own Obituary

            How ironical is it that I write my own obituary today when others – notably my ardent practitioners, the civil servants – condescend to celebrate the Civil Services Day! I’m none too sure if it isn’t on purpose – to humiliate me when I am already in my terminal stage of life and afflicted with many illnesses. Without much ado, let me recount my tale of woes, which, in a manner of speaking, is my honest obituary no one else but me would dare write.

            I was spawned by the British in the mid-19^th century when the Raj held unquestioned sway across the length and breadth of India. My job, to start with, was fairly simple: to collect revenue and to maintain law and order. Slowly, and little by little, my role changed, and the task of maintaining law and order became tricky and cumbersome in the wake of the national movement to free the country from the British yoke. Then came India’s independence in 1947. I looked forward to this new and, what I thought, exciting phase of my life.

But my outrageous optimism was completely misplaced. I was in for a rude shock. Far from the deliverance I thought independence would grant me, I quickly realized that the people who rode on my back were far from the jockeys I was used to up until then. They were known by the genteel term of civil servants but they were anything but that. They were neither civil nor servants. They joined the civil service not because they wanted to serve the nation and the people but to self-aggrandize and enrich themselves: wield power and abuse it, improve their lot (financial, positional or societal), gain visibility and generally make lives comfortable for their and their unborn (and unforeseeable) future generations.

I blanched at the upstarts and the parvenus riding high on their hobby horse of power and its multi-hued abuses. I was not used to such Johnny-come-latelies. This, I felt, mostly in the 1960s through to the 70s till about the 1990s. My plight began when a certain Czarina riding the crest of uber-glory in the early-197os wanted to change my DNA summarily. She wanted me to shed my time-worn and putative neutrality tag and exchange it for commitment to her cause. I wasn’t amused. But I was helpless, even distraught.

Events were moving ahead fast. Commitment had become the buzzword in the nation’s lexicon. Even the powerful and revered judiciary started feeling the pinch. The Supreme Court bowed to supersession of its three senior-most judges, though not without whimper and protest. So who was I to protest, particularly when my jockeys were mostly made of putty clay, and turncoats and time-servers themselves, had quickly jumped into the bandwagon of the season to make hay – in their mindless quest for quick upward social and material mobility.

Frankly, this was only the prelude to my demise. The rest, as they say, is history. If permit-quota-licence raj had put a cap on dishonesty, the liberalized era that was heralded with panache placed no such set limits. It was now a world of every (wo)man for (her)himself with even devil scared off to take the hindmost! How Mephistopheles had been suitably shushed!

The game-plan was different, so were the game-changers. Unbeknownst, insidiously and incipiently, natural resources attained a Midas touch. Who cares when an impersonal, insentient entity as a Nation-State can be bled to death with impunity! And protest it didn’t – this gloriously magnificent, magnanimous body! – as robbery, thievery and desecration laid waste to its every limb.

Unfortunately, Anno Domini 2010 trumped the ingenuities of all these game-planners and game-changers. The chutzpah and loot of national resources – earthly, heavenly, other-worldly – came about with quick-fire rapidity for the ordinary souls’ comfort. Every denizen of consequence helming these bodies (the honchos thought them starry!) went about on overdrive. The loot could no longer be ignored and glossed over. The world found the rape of CWG nothing but a daylight heist. A certain (in)sane institution the fathers of the Constitution had tamped down on the Indian democratic polity screamed and telecommunicated to the Indian nation through the 2-G medium, the humongous loot of its national resources. Around this time, unbidden, the Kargil war heroes had decided to sit up upright in mudra posture in their Adarsh graves by the Arabian Sea in a megalopolis called Mumbai. Like the Greek tragedy, nemesis had come calling on these limitless hubris!

The Supreme Court too had begun its share of bashing, making the defunct CBI and other vigilante outfits do its bit to earn their salary. The media – frenetically looking around to establish their credibility in 24 x 7 times – gloatingly latched on to these dollops of offering. The civil society, till the other day droopy, somnolent and complaisant, suddenly woke up with a start. The newest Mahatma, with his time-tested fast ceaselessly transmitted in the visual medium, didn’t help matters. The die had been cast.

Today, as I stand at the crossroad of history, I see nothing but the ghost of my own past. The Lokpal Bill, now under passionate drafting by the civil society, will surely write finis to my career. Who, tell me, in his senses, will like to embrace me and become a civil servant? He will not have wings to fly literally and metaphorically. No frivolous rubbernecking across the globe at tax-payers’ expense. No nightly pillage (forget the daylight swindle!) since the CCTV and electron microscopes will scan their every move and transaction.

In hindsight’s 20-20, if the Right to Information was the ultimate act of indecency, the Lokpal shall lamentably be the last fig-leaf in this striptease. As though that isn’t enough to write my dirge, there are still some shouting themselves hoarse from the housetop and simplifying a complex, nuanced issue into an easy algebraic equation: Corruption = Monopoly + Discretion – Accountability.

So that’s going to be my unsung end, my untimely death-knell. So please do me the honours simply enshrining as epitaph on my tombstone!

Share

Right to Corruption-Free Governance

The events of the past week are unprecedented in the annals of independent India. The civil society has forced itself in playing a role in the democratic polity. The Jan Lokpal Bill provided the trigger. And the groundswell of support Anna Hazare’s fast received across the country – from the inelectable couldn’t-care-less youth to the unelected nonchalant non-voting middle class – was the proverbial last straw on the nation’s back.

Unarguably never in 64 years of independent India has any single year witnessed this fusillade and testosterone of scams big time that we have borne in the uber-ignoble year 2010 Anno Domini. It was a year like no other. It was a year riddled with scams that poured forth with mind-boggling regularity. CWG, Adarshgate, 2-G, Sukhna Defence land scam, ISRO-Devas deal, Prasar Bharati scam, Karnataka land scam, the CVC imbroglio, Nira Radia teletape revelations were way too gratuitous for civil society to give it a go-by. We should be eternally grateful to the Rajas and Kalmadis to have woken up the civil society from its deep slumber and united it as never before!

It is about time the civil society asked for Right to Corruption-free Governance as a part of its fundamental right to be enshrined in the Constitution. It is as important and as fundamental as the right to equality or right to freedom of expression or right to religious practices or right to constitutional remedies. It is as basic as right to live and breathe. And to think that this fundamental right has not only been given a short shrift but been torn to shreds with imperious impunity!

How vital the Lokpal Bill is will be clear if we start from the scratch. In a compact that forms society or nation, the basic unit is man. A nation exists for its people, who have decided to come together to form a state or nation through a covenant that is binding on all to govern itself and to benefit all its stakeholders uniformly. There are the necessary checks and balances to preempt malfeasance and misfeasance on those saddled with governance. Let’s start with human instinct. This, since time immemorial, is as kleptocratic as the oldest profession on earth.

So given human beings are epicures, there would forever be the impulse to improve one’s lot in a society that values hedonism – even when transactions are not always licit. So checkmate illicit impulses: by law that are not long-drawn; by transparency that makes even RTI redundant; by e-governance that posits, postulates, and posts transactions that are tamper-proof. And this is why there is a need for a feisty oversight mechanism.

There are many demands in the Jan Lokpal Bill that should be beyond reproach for all honest, right-thinking people. Take for instance the need to merge the CBI with the Lokpal. This would provide necessary independence to CBI from the clutches of governing unit. Similarly there is nothing Mephistophelean about it. The suggestion for minimum punishment of five years and maximum of life imprisonment can’t be flawed.

Nor can one fault the suggestion that there must be deterrence against frivolous complaints in the form of financial penalties. Or to provide protection against physical and professional victimization of whistleblowers. Likewise, loss caused to the government due to corruption must be recovered from all accused. The issue of Lokpal institution embracing everyone – bureaucrats, politicians, judiciary including the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court – should be welcomed by all honest denizens occupying such exalted offices, though it must be ensured that the Lokpal doesn’t become another Frankenstein.

Much as an oversight body with teeth sends a shudder down the criminal’s spine, it, paradoxically, grants spine and vim to the honest public servant to go that extra mile and outshine himself. Why must then one baulk at the thought of empowering the Lokpal to initiate suo motu investigation in any case without reference or permission from anyone? This is, of course, predicated upon the fact that the Lokpal won’t just be an advisory body but would have powers to register FIR, proceed with criminal investigations and launch prosecution. Hong Kong’s Independent Commission Against Corruption is a kind of super-body against corruption. It combines investigation, prevention, and popular participation – all rolled in one.

In effect, we are left with just three issues that can be bickered. These are fairly trivial and one would hope, given the maturity, intent, and experience of both sides it shouldn’t pose problem to arrive at unanimity. One relates to the constitution of the Lokpal. The civil society activists want this to consist of one chairperson and ten members, of which four with legal background. The other relates to investigations and trial that must be quick and should be completed within one year. Though it would be hard to lay a timeframe, the fact that investigation should be completed in quick time is indubitable.

            We must force a splash: Catching Big Fish and frying them – deep, long, hard, and crisp. Big Fish have high visibility and the more the frying the more the message roundly conveyed. The public tends to weigh effectiveness by status! Nothing kills public confidence more than the belief that the anti-corruption effort is directed only at the small fishes. It needs remembering that Italy’s unprecedented success in its fight against corruption was largely due to frying a top Mafia official, many top business executives, and several major politicians from the ruling party. This told citizens that if they denounced crime and corruption, they certainly could make a difference.  Yikes.

Today, civil society is livid – beyond words. The media has played its part with pox-on-your-face rebuke to unearth crimes notwithstanding the luminaries, caught in crosshairs, spewing venom on them for being the judge, jury, and the executioner. Let the detritus and scums of earth spend themselves out with their spiels of curses worn on their Teflon-coated shirt-fronts. It’s time for India to awake, phoenix-like, from the ashes that public servants have reduced it to. This is not a clarion call; this is a fervent appeal from one proud Indian to fellow proud citizens who would wish to live an honest and dignified life amid this encircling and unending vista of scams – and swindle of public money.

Am I a cosmic optimist to will the Lokpal Bill to galvanize the nation in its quest for honesty? Or, is it malicious to say it will willy-nilly lead one way – to resigned exasperation, as in the past?

Share

Friendship in a Changing World

When on a lazy weekend or on a blessed holiday, I reminisce my days with friends in school and college in the 1960s and 70s, I can see the look of disbelief in my children’s eyes. “How it could be?” their eyes popping out, seem to be scanning my mind. If they quickly change tack, it’s because they’ve, over the years, seen my childhood friends visit us, live with us, and interact with us. But that fleeting moment of disbelief is etched in my mind.
Over time friendships change, mostly due to divides – material, social, geographical, professional – that crop up as years go by. Friends become acquaintances, acquaintances/colleagues friends. But acquaintance-colleague-friendship matrix is not exactly like childhood friendship and rarely adorns the garb of uninhibited friendship of younger days. Some say you don’t make friends in later life, the alchemy of schools and colleges aids and promote friendships; later-day friends are not the same as childhood friends – they verge on acquaintanceship and border on the private thoughts’ periphery.

Not surprisingly, inscrutable time – kills as much as it heals. It kills friendships through disuse, the distance – geographical, mental, and psycho-spatial – not exactly helping the cause. In a rapidly changing possessive individualistic world with upward social mobility the leitmotif of human existence – or so we think – friendships are churned and tossed over in a limitless sea of possibilities. Quickly these possibilities hammer out their inherent probabilities that are largely mutated by social status and pecking order, material riches and professional necessities. To still call them friendships, as some protagonists do, is a travesty of any earthy friendship. They are not friendships – so devoid are they of the naturalness and the everydayness that once attended their friendship when they’re young.

Sadly this churning smothers and put pays to most childhood friendships. If they motor along with cloying symbolism for reasons of past emotion and ancient love (Alas, long lost!), they hobble about with putative crutches. Only for a while. The crutches are addenda, never convenient, and least envisioned in the original, pristine friendship’s scheme of things that freely and unhesitatingly admitted friends into the private recesses of one’s mind. The synthesis of mutual ideas and preferences, likes and dislikes – personal and familial – was the bedrock on which friendship efflorescenced.

It would be presumptuous of me to put this down to human cunning and aspiration in the societal totem pole. As paths take different trajectories, friends with humble glow feel unwanted and lost, even staggeringly out of whack, in company of humans with supernova success who were once friends. The commonality of interest they once shared is in tatters what with the turbo-charged now grown fretful to share precious time with his unfortunate proletariat also-friend for no better reason than of past childhood baggage now appearing light years away. Inequality and varying successes in life coupled with hedonistic quotients – plus the mutual spouses’ emotion deficits – crowd out the past. It is not the best recipe for a sustained lifelong friendship. Friendships – never set in stone – start withering. The meetings with little-something-to-share become scarce, the telephone vibes rarer, and text messages go missing. Time the friendship-pooper has raised its ugly head. Success begets hubris that fillets the mind with razzmatazz and places no premium on human goodness; failure begets coyness and distancing, imprisoning thoughts and emotions in private preserve of one’s mind. Amid all this, either party forgets that life is infinitesimally finite.

How old friendships fall by the wayside and new – brand new ones – pretend to take shape! This is not to say that there are no exceptions. There indeed are, but often enfeebled. It takes two exceptional human beings differently placed in life to stay the steadfast friends of yore. Each, at every point of contact, need to forget his existential place society has blessed/condemned them with/to and find that sliver of common interest that can keep the friendship going. How long, you’ll ask, such contrived relationship can last? More often than not they peter away unless the successful and rich is a human full up with the punctilio of higher code and sensibility and takes that extra care amid the encircling demand on his time. Not unoften such relationships languish and perish. You really can’t blame either though this can’t be a calming fact for the less fortunate.

Today’s friendships are different, sculpted in schools and colleges, offices and workplaces, where the mutual families rarely figure. During our times families provided the bedrock, a benevolent eye and loving glue that made friends more than friends; they became a son or a daughter (or nephew or niece) in their friends’ homes. The respective families became another family for them where the doors were open anytime of the day and where they could put their feet up and relax.

I can still recall fondly how my mother would cook 4-5 extra lunches or dinners so that my friends visiting me joined the family for the repast. Friends stayed at each others places, not because it was late for them to get back home, but because it felt nice to have them for a few days. It was like a cousin come home visiting.

Today, my children’s world is different. Rarely is it eating at mutual homes; they prefer eating Mac-Foods at in-your-mouth food courts, among themselves, and not with friends’ families. When I hear them traffic in their stereotypes, I stop trying to explain to them the fetishes of their ways. The family glue that encompassed our friendships and provided loving avuncular touch is missing. Unlike ours, we know little of our children’s friends, let alone their families. I guess there’s more independence and more distancing than the inextricability and phrasing of our days. The world’s changed; the degree of informality of our times has morphed into a more formal frame informed with individual human calculus.

Human relationship is a manifestation of the time we live in. The feudal world has given way to a capitalist-industrial order with premium on time where laidback living is an anachronism. And amid this welter of intense competition – dog-eat-dog syndrome! – it would be facetious of me to valorize that my children’s friendship or the lingering friendship of my younger days would conjure visions of a world-and-time long past. If there are some, still trundling along with the intensity of its younger days and with the same languid silkiness of time-in-hand, go count your blessings. Because, unbeknownst to us, the odds today are stacked against such luxuries.

Share