The Unbearable Lightness of being!

By Kaveri Waghela

We all know that India is a democracy. Everything here is for the people, of the people and by the people. So it’s quite obvious that corruption too in India is for the people, of the people and certainly, by the people!

India is ranked 84th in the corruption scale and thanks to the latest 2G Scam ,CWG Scam; I cannot imagine the ranking then! The people or more coherently put,’the aam aadmi’ blames it on the government and the government blames it on the people. It is a vicious circle. The portion or the chunk that remains in oblivion are our very own ‘Big Businesses’ They have the power and the money to bent the ethics and emerge as triumphant souls who have the widest grins on their faces and the widest waistline to fill their corruption laden pockets. So is India really a democracy? To which I say." No Dammit..India is a sly capitalist in an avatar of a democracy!” Now honestly, that is a trait! The urban middle class are just too busy working in call centres, studying abroad or buying their first blackberry's! The wider chunks which are often described as a ‘minority’ are the lower caste people who cannot even avail of a loaf of bread. They live in shoddy houses which are at the behest of the environment. One rain storm and what remains are shackles, dismantled, disorganised…The Tatas, the birlas and the ambanis are shamefully beaten by the A Rajas, the ‘evasive’ Niira Radias and our very own 'journalism wale bande' like Vir Sanghvi and Barkha dutt. So we are in a country where ‘The Right to Information act ‘is considered a landmark and still these bigwigs in the face of humans rip our nation off its consciousness! People believe the world is going to end on the 21st of December ,2012. I say that the world has already died a silent death. It is on ventilator support forever and offcourse, the hospital charges are paid by the’ Bigwig Motley Crowd'. But amidst all this darkness there is hope! There are still some people like Anna Hazare who are fighting for the Jan lokpal bill ( The Anti-Corruption bill). The poor 79 year old has to go for a hunger strike to put forth his admonition. We here, sitting in our Uv protected glass houses call ourselves ‘ The greatest democracy ever’. Instead of standing up and giving support to the organisation our very own ‘rich by the dozen Marathi manoos(Sharad Pawar) with a lot of saunskruti(typical Marathi accent) quits from the Group of Ministers on corruption, Thankfully! We all know why! There are some government officials that still do not take and bribe to cater their services. But how efficiently we generalise them into ‘ the typical government ka aadmi’. Corruption starts at grass root level forget RTI! I am just thinking what if the Lokpal bill comes into force where will Sharad Pawar be then??