Let Me Fly

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Rough Sail

Moves on, Ol’ horse
Two at the helm
The rider erstwhile,
Lonely sail’rr
steps down (or up?)
Tradesmen O’Clear
cry hoarse
Ill Lane, Sorry!

Will it be fracas
Sliding into doom
Or will it be a mark
Never heard of?
Hurdles aplenty
Impel its finest craft.
Time, the good Ol’ time
Will tell. Till well.

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Cut State

The mirror when broken
in pieces two
Will trick your eyes
and show faces two

Do you, then, O one
become two
Just because it says
you are now two?

You were never one
if you are two;
If you are one
you will never be two

 

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Dog’s life

you want me, at all hours, to
cringe to your drumbeat
give in to a sagging spine
be hushed and whooshed off
when your convoy passes by

lick your boots so neat
when you trample and whack
thank the blade hasn’t slain
be unabashedly loyal
and proud of my servitude

you, wily wolf, want me to
slit my brother’s flesh
pay for your bread and meats
and when my home burns to ashes
pray you and curse my fate

and how well do i do this
– for the plaque, a fake,
that reads ‘good citizen’ –
verily like a wagging dog
more screwed than a pavlovian!

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Check, Mate!

two grand old foes,
cold war never too behind,
make a few moves deft
on the board checkered
gray, shrewd and shrouded
to castle a pawn
the world watches mute
oh! what an endgame

one man who blew
the whistle, sans regret
banished, stranded
and now hounded
talks to himself,
“Snow, found a Den yet?”
“Den, no. It’s Snowing
I’m lost of moves”

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Dissent, Decent

Bertrand Russell’s reply to a magistrate’s request that he pledge himself to “good behavior”, after an anti-nuclear demonstration in London, for which Russell was arrested (in September 1961), as quoted in Intercontinental Press, Vol. VIII (1970), p. 132.

“No, I won’t.”

“No, I won’t!”

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The Subway Diary

I can’t distinguish between sleep and wakefulness these days, but if this is called waking up, I have just woken up. You open the eyes, stretch the limbs, join the rush, pace with the clock till it’s dusk, or till your eyes close again. A day in one’s life. I had known such days. Till four months ago.

I fold my bed carefully and put it in the hole. They gave me this pack when they threw me out of that bus. The stock has to last for one year, I was told. Should I have to visit the Embassy to collect the stock, I wondered. I don’t need to. They will come and give me. It’s all right if I forget the track of time, and I most likely will. They will remember. They will keep the clock for me.

This is my domicile. It’s an abandoned subway. It used to stink when I was thrown in, but I have gotten used to it now. One of my friends had a theory that it takes a man 21 days to get used to something. I didn’t keep a count, but I guess it didn’t take me longer than that. The subway, just like the rest of the city, is under surveillance. And that’s how they will fish my body when I die.

Image courtesy of Corbis

I walk up the steps and smell the day. How does one smell the day? Live my life for two weeks and you will, too.

The din of the city is gradually getting louder. Artemis de Cuba is a secret Cuban province. You won’t find it on the map. It’s a small picturesque island, two hours off Guantanamo, and a favorite retreat for the mafia. The city is rich and thickly guarded. Unless you are in close circles of mafia or politics, you can’t get out of this island alive. Should you get caught scheming an escape, they will put you on a boat to Guantanamo as a subject for training the new recruits in torture methods. If at all they don’t shoot in your brains and dump you dead in the sea while on the boat itself.

People walk past me. I walk past them. I’m not a stranger anymore. I would cross three lanes and I know my place. I arrange my humble spread and sit at the foot of the skyscraper. On a lucky day, in two hours I get the money needed for a basic meal and tea. I sit here because this is closer to airport. I look at the skies and I see these planes – all of them private, chartered jets – flying. And I fancy one of them mistaking me for a head of a drug cartel and flying me out of this place, back in time, for an evening with a Brazilian escort, but losing the direction and landing in India. Or even, having realised the mistake, push me into the sea below. From where I would swim, across one sea after another, to reach the tip of India. And resting on the sand, cry. Cry loud, to my little daughter, “Darling, I have come!”

An old man hurriedly drops a coin into my bowl. I lower my eyes and look at it. I say, “thank you”, but he has already left. Within two hours, thanks to a few generous souls, I have enough money to buy myself a meal. What would my daughter think if she is told her father is now a beggar? At six years, she is too young to examine her prejudices, but also old enough to imagine her father in a beggar’s rags and form a lasting opinion, as a consequence. Her mother abhors beggars and has done a good job of gifting her prejudice to the little one. It takes a snap to form a bias; to undo it takes a lifetime.

By the time I finish brunch, it’s almost noon. I don’t know when I will have a good meal again, so I sit there for some time and relish. I close my eyes and feel the sun on my face.

Swiftly walking by, a young man pulls a coin out of his pocket and throws at me. Before I thank him, he has joined the crowd. They never look at me. If they do, they would see their own guilt. Charity is the easiest way to get rid of guilt. Pull out a coin, throw at the guy, and you are a step closer to the heaven. I gulp a piece of bread, sip a cup of tea and take them closer to heaven. By sheer accident.

But this isn’t a bargain I had asked for. I had a life just like these people who, dressed in rich suits, are hurriedly making their way to work. I was a strategy consultant with one of the biggest brands on the globe. Fat pay, enviable perks, two cars in the garage, annual holidays in the Caribbean, medical insurance, education allowance for the kid, I had everything. I didn’t see a blot on the road ahead, I was proud, confident, and believed I don’t owe anything to the world. And then, in one hour, everything changed.

I remember that day. “Come over with your docs in an hour. A quick meeting”, the voice on the phone said. It was an acquaintance at the Embassy. Must be for an important trip, I thought. The guy didn’t smile when I entered his cabin. I was told that a confidential file of national security, which I had prepared for a defence client, got leaked and, probably, traded. “But it was protected, encrypted at two levels, and can’t go out without approval from high-office”, I clarified. “But we can’t touch the big fish”, he admitted upfront. “And because you know this secret too, we got you”, he added. They took me into a voice-proof room, stripped me, burned my documents – passport, bank cards, identity cards, education and work papers, everything – and put me on a plane. I was blindfolded. A couple of minutes later, I felt a sharp prick of a needle on my wrist. For a few seconds, I felt everything was spinning and slowing down. When I regained my consciousness, I found myself sitting in that bus. I wanted to know what, if at all, they had informed to my family. To my daughter. But they wouldn’t answer. Can I make a phone call? No answer. When will they send me back? No answer. Estranged. Stripped of identity. Done in.

Education would see me through. Or so I thought. I would find some work, make calls to home, post notes on Facebook, file an online petition, and it will be fine. A few weeks of tough life, but I will be out. Rahim laughed at me, “you are naive”. Rahim was the guy I first met when I took the steps down the subway. He looked younger to me, but I never asked his age. He taught Economics at Stanford, he told me. A migrant from Pakistan, he was picked up as a terrorist suspect after he strongly defended on Facebook a campaign that questioned the government’s stand on freedom of speech. I wanted to know why he thought I was naive. “Because you are in a rat-hole and are still thinking in terms of options. That’s what the world makes you into. Your life depends on someone’s whim, they kick your butt, put you into a hole”, he stressed, “close the doors and expect you to find the way out, yourself!”

I was still not convinced. Rahim explained, “Not for nothing is this a secret province. Once you are in here, there’s no way out. You are an illegal entity here. Nobody is allowed to give you work. Without identity proof you are not allowed to make calls. Besides, you can make calls only to other provinces. Calls to your country and my country are barred. Unless you are, you know, in close circles with mafia. If at all you go the distance and steal one of their phones and call your home, they will intercept your call, track you down and kill you in ten minutes”. It made me feel more gloomy and angry. “Without identity proof, again, you cannot step into any internet kiosk. And no, this ain’t no movie, so don’t imagine some generous bystander helping you with his iPad. Every mail is tracked, every IP is mapped, every corner of the city is under surveillance. Nobody will risk it for you. And Facebook? Twitter? Mail? Ha ha ha! You surely don’t know the world, bro! Your profiles must have already been erased!” he added. “J-u-s-t l-i-k-e t-h-a-t!” he snapped his fingers. “And in a world obsessed with evidence, how will you prove your identity?”

“It can’t be that bad”, I tried to tell myself. “Authoritarian regimes are vile. Human rights are totally violated”, I opined, trying to keep it as a mature conversation and not yield to my emotion. He again chided me to not repeat from the book, but look deeper. “All regimes are just the same, bro! It’s a power game. In authoritarian states, they use torture; in democratic states, they use persuasion. Whichever way, it’s the state that decides your choices”. His argument was forceful, so I couldn’t refute. At the same time, I refused to lose. “But even at relative terms, democratic states grant you more freedom. Your voice is at least heard”, I made a point. “Freedom is a big myth, a sort of global urban legend! In a state that is strongly capitalist and with a thriving consumerist culture, feedback is a cog that helps their competition. So you are encouraged to voice your grievance, and they make you believe you have the same equation with the state. You are a scapegoat. You voiced your story. Did anyone give a fuck? You think your state or your company wasn’t aware that you would be deported? Why do you want to deceive yourself more? Wake up!”

I couldn’t move. His words, “Wake up!” played in my mind for some time. He had to add, “And who said you don’t have freedom here? You are free to move around in the town, you can sleep anywhere. You won’t be killed for begging. Public toilets are free to use, and they are clean. If you pass out or get shot, health care is free”. I noticed his dismissive shrug. “You could visit the girls, they give you a special price. They are kind”, he winked.

He seemed to be familiar with this place. He could help me out, I reckoned. “Well, I had everything till the other day. Now here I am. I don’t have any document. I want to go back to my little daughter. I at least want to call up and hear her voice, and tell her I am alive. I can do some work. I could… teach, do computers…”, I tried to add. “And?” he asked. “I could… I could wash cars, clean the tables”, I was desperate. “Can you sell drugs?” he asked. “Impossible. I will rather die than sell drugs!” I asserted.

One week later, he introduced me to a crack gang. After I told him I will never sell drugs, he didn’t ask me again. But probably he knew I would relent. For six days, I knocked on the doors of offices, homes, hotels and malls. Nobody would give me any work. When I returned at nights, fighting the pangs of hunger, he would offer me bread. Desperation was getting to me. I wanted to call up, if only once, and find out how my daughter was doing. “I want to give it a try”, I finally told Rahim. He briefed me. “It’s illegal by the book. But do you think cops don’t know? There are millions in it, and state needs it. You do good, you make quick bucks. No danger from cops, they will look the other way. The danger is from the other gangs. Even from your own. But, hey, it’s not any more cruel than it’s in a corporate. There, they fire with pink slips. Here, they use guns. You rise the ranks, they may even help you visit your country”.

In my job, I always smuggled ideas. It is the norm. It is the game. My conscience was clean. Now if I were to smuggle drugs, what’s so bad, after all, I reckoned. Rahim almost read my mind. “You are trained to believe that everything legal is moral and everything illegal, immoral. If selling drugs were legal, would you have taken so much time to decide?” When the gang briefed me about the job, it sounded very similar to a job description in a multinational. If one looked at their organization chart, he wouldn’t be able to tell the difference, either. It wasn’t an ethical question for me anymore, but that of my own grit. I was enticed by the fact that I could save money and somehow find a way out. But the stakes were high – one mistake, and I must pay with my life. Can I risk it? Survive longer, save coin by coin, and meticulously plan an escape, or risk it, live on the fringe and rather even die? I had thought about this even before I met them. Rahim warned me to be polite with them, no matter what. I weighed in the stakes again. Politely, I thanked them and told I am not ready for it yet. With a grin and a hard pat, the guy said, “Easy. No worries. Whenever”.

Although in Rahim I found a chap who I could share my anguish with, I hated him because he seemed to have answers for everything. He was incisive and witty. I tried to find the method in this madness, and he reminded I am mad. I could not come to terms with the situational irony of my life, he persuaded me to confront it. I can’t say I made friends with Rahim, for I didn’t spend much time with him. And in whatever short time I had spent, I was preoccupied with my thoughts and hardly tried to know anything about him. However, in the few discussions we had, he packed in insights that I couldn’t crack in my lifetime. If I have survived here for so long, I owe it to him. Three weeks after I met him, at about midnight a crack gang came in and took him away. Rahim told me that the new recruits in these gangs compete for cash awards on Ximbo, the local version of YouTube, by posting videos of their violent attacks on the homeless. I don’t know if they killed him, but after that night I have never seen him again.

A few hours go by, as I reminisce and pointlessly observe the crowd. I sit on the pavement, sipping tea. My cap is torn at its edges. With my thick beard to add, I look funny and out of place. On the opposite side, a young woman is talking on the phone. Her other hand is firmly clasping her little daughter’s hand. They may be waiting for the bus, returning home after a round of shopping. The woman looks complete with the baby. People are wrong when they say a woman completes a man and vice-versa. If that were so, marriage by itself would be fulfilling. But that’s not how it is. It is children who complete them both – the man and the woman. The nurtured becomes the nurturer, life comes full circle. The little girl looks at me. I look back and she smiles. Maybe she finds me amusing, or maybe, by some miracle, she saw in my eyes the beautiful face of my daughter. A minute later, the bus arrives.

After a short walk, I find a place to sit outside a park. I watch the children playing. A little kid approaches me and puts a chocolate in the bowl. I smile at him. His mother scolds him and pulls him away. Over the next hour, a few people notice me and I gather some coins. The city is brightly lit and it has started to get cold. I get up and start walking. It takes about 30 minutes to the subway. I take the shortcut to reach sooner. I reach the penultimate lane when I spot a group of young guys chatting and smoking. It doesn’t feel all too well, but I just keep at it. I will just walk by quietly and not stare at them, I assess. As I am just about to walk past them, two guys stand up and intercept me. We don’t exchange any words or stares. Quickly, they check on me and find nothing. One of them pulls the change I had gathered in the day from my pocket. Finished with, they push me away.

Anger would have been a fair response, but I realise this is the world I have made. I realise I am responsible for the world, as it is. This much is clear to me – that I had lived like a frog in a well. I thought if I have a good job, a family, and minded my own business, I am living it perfectly. Why do I need to care for, or understand, the world, I convinced myself. What do I care if some country, thousands of miles away from mine, is at unrest, I would dismiss with arrogance. But I see that to think one is alone and independent is a delusion. Every time I forgot to be kind, every word I spoke in anger, every act of indifference, every prejudice I held as truth, every truth I refused to believe – at every such moment, I made the world what it is. Now I am paying for it. Everyone must pay. If you are lucky to make it through life unscathed, your kids will pay. If they are lucky too, your grand-kids will.

I reach the subway. When I walk down these steps, there’s no note of piano that I hear. All I hear is the haunting sound of my own feet hitting against the floor.

I spread my bed carefully and lie down. In an hour or two, some young chaps, ambitious of winning cash awards on Ximbo and making it big in a drug cartel, may stop by and pick me up. Or they may come next evening. Or the day after. A day or two later, someone munching on popcorn will, after watching the bullet hole crack my skull open and my frame drop dead to the ground, point the cursor on the Like button and click it. Deliverance of another kind, but if there’s no deliverance from this hole, that’s the second best. It’s that time of the hour when, if that guy from the Embassy hadn’t called me that day, I would hold my little one in my arms and hum the rhyme that only two of us know. It’s meaningless, but she gets it. Quietly, I sing what has become her favorite lullaby.

Round round round and round round round
In such a big ground, round round round

Daddy round, baby round, round round round
You and me on the ground, round round round

I just hope my daughter is listening to it. Will I ever see her again? I don’t know. I don’t want to know. Imperceptibly, and stealthy as a snake, fear grips my frame. With every fleeting moment, the tide of hope seems to recede further. With hopeless resolve, though, I want to hang on to its faintest edge. There’s a secret cam somewhere in this dungeon. It could be right above, looking into my tear-dimmed eyes. The indifferent stare of the world. As I look into blinding darkness, I wish this night never ends.

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Soliloquy

freedom you have, but rules are mine
of speech, did you say? of course
whisper to yourself, in quiet at that
else be mired with cops and sections!

farce thus leads grimace, hamlet-esque
to post or not to post, then,
and to like or not to like
face-booked, these are the questions!

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Political ladder

Barely an hour after I had reached an acquaintance’s and had a cup of tea, I heard a knock on the door. He rushed and opened. They greeted him warmly, and one could see they knew him quite well. When Aunt entered the room and greeted them, her manner and tone suggested she too was familiar with them. The group, I realised soon, was out for a political campaign. And this chap, in his mid-twenties, has impressive people skills and a strong local network. They wanted him to join.

“Leave me alone today. I have a guest and I promised to take him around our town”, he offered an excuse.

The group insisted he must join. He had to agree. Aunt smiled and said, “He is always on the roads!” I smiled.

As he prepared to leave, he told me he will return in a couple of hours and then take me out. It meant I could just laze around for some time, so I definitely had no problem. Curiously I asked about the motives of the group. He briefed me that they are, among other things, committed to support Team Anna’s campaign againt corruption.

“Great”, I said. “Do you believe in Anna’s campaign?”

Tucking in his shirt, he replied with a smile, “I don’t have any stand on that. But then who cares? I campaign for them, and they pay me 100 bucks per day”.

“That’s nice!”

“Yeah, bro!” he combed his hair. “Watch some TV. I will soon be back. Ciao!”

“Ciao!”

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The Great Indian Farce

Besides becoming increasingly political, team Anna’s campaign is becoming increasingly farcical. I find it amusing that the campaign has attracted so much attention in the first place. But this is largely due to media’s obsession for creating sensation about every damn thing. It’s sick that media and supporters alike are referring to Anna almost like a saint. And those innumerable references to him being a Gandhian! It’s the same fawning attitude that the country had maintained for Nehru family that it is showing now for Anna and his team.

First, he is not at all a Gandhian. Far from it. Gandhi’s grandson himself admitted he finds equating Anna with Gandhi funny. However, it’s an irrelevant point. It matters little if he is one or not. He may have done commendable job in his village. Reward him with Bharat Ratna, recommend him for two Nobel prizes too. But that’s that. Extrapolating it to suggest that he is some saviour of the entire country is illogical and idiotic. It speaks low of the intelligence of the population, but probably that’s really how dumb we are. If it is indeed true that thousands of youth are supporting the campaign, then it makes me feel sad. When the young are so thoughtless, then the future of the country is hopeless.

It appears that when some countries got sick of dictatorship and made violent yet bold moves to try democracy, India is willingly letting a despotic team take the reins.

Corruption
Corruption is not about money. It’s about greed. It’s about values. Our entire education system is designed for the sole purpose of earning livelihood. Success is worshipped (btw, this isn’t an exaggeration. The increasing number of suicides among students more than clearly suggests how much importance the society places on academic performance). Success is measured in terms of wealth. Ambition is encouraged and the young are constantly driven to compete and succeed. Naturally, the system endorses accumulation of wealth and private ownership. As much as one dislikes to admit, money is an important criterion for the institution of marriage. This is the system we live in.

One is expected to succeed, so one is always on the run to earn more than his peers. Greed is not looked at as harmful anymore, so much so that advertising campaigns overtly suggest that greed is cool. With such a system in place, why is it then a surprise if corruption is rife? Such a system naturally encourages corruption. So when we don’t do anything to change the system, but try to address a superficial offshoot, are we solving the problem totally? Will it ever stop corruption?

Media
Media is a shameless bitch. Movies like Rann only mildly give a glimpse of how media houses are actually run. It’s only the gullible who would believe that media are really concerned about citizens. We have scribes in hundreds, but how many investigative journalists do we have, for a country our size? How many of us know how actually crime and political reporting is done? Anyways, that’s beside the point.

Media make it sound as if corruption is a recent phenomenon. Take a sting camera and go to any court in the country and record 30 minutes of footage at any magistrate’s or lawyer’s and it’ll make for a brilliant piece in any documentary on corruption. Extend it further and follow a case for a week, and you can make two films. If one cares enough, catch the lower staff of police or a court, offer him a drink and converse with him for three hours and you can crack all the behind-the-scenes stories. Check with a constable how much he had paid to get into service. Check with the helpless villagers who are subject to endless rounds of visits to courts, harassed by cops, lawyers and the powerful. Check with the retired employees who slogged their lifetimes for government and are then harassed by government for months when they seek pension. Worse, check with orphans, refugees, the displaced if they receive funds and the conditions they are made to live in. Install spycams in any lawyer’s and get an hour’s footage and air it. Actually, no need to air it. Everyone who has been there knows it.

What have media done till the team Anna had surfaced? Sleeping? They have not woken up even now. It’s funny that some people get carried away and defend the media group they follow, as being genuinely fighting for people’s cause. One simply forgets that the editor, let alone reporters, is just another chap who is working to push a few points up in his next appraisal. This is not to dismiss all editors, but to only stress that the majority in the mainstream cannot be expected to be expansive and standing up for people’s cause.

While electronic media exploited the campaign to their advantage, very few eds cared to ask pertinent questions of the team and its campaign. However, given the blind support from the masses, these few voices were never heard.

We (People)
To believe that passing a certain bill will solve the problem is the upshot of very lazy and superficial thinking. The campaign suggests that it’s only the politicians and bureaucrats who are corrupt. But they can’t be corrupt if we are not. It’s not possible. However, by supporting the campaign, we are conveniently absolving our responsibility. In the name of honesty, we are shamelessly justifying our deeds of corruption. Statements like, “but he demanded, so I had to give”, “but I needed my passport urgently, so I had to bribe”, etc. We are corrupt. Country is corrupt. So when the media tell me that the country is supporting the campaign, I wonder how one misses the contradiction in that! Who is complaining against whom? People often tend to ignore, or at best rationalise, personal transgressions, but this is taking it too far.

How many supporters have actually sit and read the draft? This is not a casual question, for the heck of it. I have met at least four people in media who had actively supported team Anna, posted messages on social media, made it to the venues, admit that they have not read the draft. It’s easy to see that there are so many more such supporters who have no idea what the draft says. All they know is that the team is up with some permanent, magic solution for graft. Politicians and bureaucrats have failed us, so we blindly put the trust in an apolitical group that exploits the fixation for Gandhian ideals and persuades that they are above board and are here to save the country. While on the one hand there’s this constant statement of pride that we are a great democracy, most of the supporters are so blinded that any voice of dissent or doubts about the campaign are being dismissed outright as rubbish and anti-national. Just like Anna and his team, the supporters are not open for any debate. And then we look down upon fundamentalists!

Politicians have been failing us. For decades. Yet, it is we who elected them. Again and again. It’s absurd to not exercise any prudence while voting and come back and complain when politicians exploit. While voting, we never press for the history of candidates. We never press for accountability or responsiveness of the state. The campaign should have actually been about this. We helplessly sit back and watch when convoys after convoys of those goons stall thousands of us on roads for hours. The campaign should have been about this. The problem is we don’t have a voice. We never had a voice. Vote is our only weapon, the only moment when we feel that sense of power. And we waste it thoughtlessly. Sadly, those who vote believe that the deed of voting, by itself, is a “responsible” gesture and blame the few who stand firm and refuse to vote. Rightly, then, we deserve this state of affairs. We deserve the corrupt goons. Importantly, we also deserve these dumb and phony teams who are equally exploitative but shrewdly persuade us that they are saviours.

We have been irresponsible. We are being irresponsible and thoughtless. Loyalty to political parties is important to us than bringing upright chaps to power. During every contest, there are goons who campaign loudly and lure with incentives, and there are also these upright chaps who plead us to make an informed and mature choice while voting. But we elect the goons! So what are we cribbing about? Why is media pretending that corruption has just been discovered while it had been there as a virus, for decades? We seek and worship power. We brag our associations with the powerful and we exploit these to our advantage. We want contracts, licenses, seats in academia, favours from police and courts, and we use these very people for the same. And if at a rare moment of introspection we do ask ourselves, “why”, we have a ready justification, “but everybody else is doing it, if I don’t do they will trample me”.

If we really believe corruption is a problem and that it needs an immediate fix, we must begin with ourselves. And it means making sacrifices. To conveniently leave it on some team to prepare the ground and if we merely want to walk in and enjoy, is to be irresponsible. How many of us are prepared and willing? The situations are often testing. Let’s take a simple one – a guy is rushing for a meeting. It’s rush hour. The auto fellow asks 20 bucks extra. No other auto in sight. Technically, if the guy agrees, it’s corruption. If the guy refuses and risks the meeting, the boss will not take it. He will think it’s dumb of the chap to risk an important meeting for a mere 20 bucks. Let him go home and share this with his spouse, and she will agree with the boss. Let him tell that the boss might screw the appraisal and, effectively, it might cost incentives, promotions and even the job, she will accuse him of being a weakling and inconsiderate too. This is the normal script. And yet, the chap, the boss, and the spouse will discuss about the evils of corruption. Nobody wants to take the risk when stakes are high. A little noise on social media, a few inconsequential conversations over coffee, a rally or two on roads are fine. That’s the bit most are prepared for. Nothing more.

Why? “But I have a family to think about”, is a ready answer. Exactly! As virtuous and noble as it may sound, it’s an easy justification. Taleb is right when he said not to trust those in corporate confinement, for they will do anything to provide for the family. This tells why such campaigns, regardless of how regionally wide they spread, are shallow and useless.

Behind all the noble talk is the demand of petty need for survival. As the classic prisoner’s dilemma suggests, it makes sense to cooperate only till the other is cooperating. So we always look for a win-win situation, which is the rational approach, as many behavioral scientists would agree. Effectively, we tend to change the external factors first. “Let the world change and I will change, too”, is the stand of the majority. It doesn’t work.

The Bill
However good the intentions, as long as we don’t improve the implementation process, it doesn’t really matter what’s there in the bill. We already have a very strongly framed rulebook. The law simply says corruption is a punishable offence, no matter who you are. Is this single statement not enough to bring the corrupt to the book? How does it matter if we frame the same statement in 20000 different ways, and brag about a 1000-page bill? We have the police, we have the CBI, we have the courts. Why do we need another group that wants a supercop status? Cops have screwed us enough. Do we seriously need supercops? Two decades hence, if we sit on a pile of complaints against these supercops, will we again ask for a super-supercop team? Are we sane?

The government and media are unnecessarily making a fuss about it. The government has nothing to fear even if it passes the bill as is, blindly. For, the rules by themselves are nothing. It’s people who implement them. People are corrupt. Power corrupts. If tomorrow I must file a complaint, I have to go to some chap who represents the team. It won’t be Anna or Kejriwal himself. It will be some local representative. Being the kind of body it is, the chap will have his own network. Just like the cops. If the guy I want to file a complaint against happens to be a friend or relative of this chap, will he pursue the complaint fairly and objectively? That’s the whole point. Merely having a foolproof rulebook is useless if people are not taught the values of being objective and upright.

Assuming that the chaps are, by some miracle, objective and fair, the problem is not over yet. The case ultimately must go through the judiciary. But is the judiciary under the purview of the bill? By a further stretch, even if one wins the case and ensures that the guy is behind bars, he can still bribe the courts and get away. Which is what is happening even now. So, what the fuck? Why do we need another bill or nationwide team to repeat the same circus?

Rules and clauses are meaningless. Given the powers that the team is seeking, we are up for screwing ourselves more. More innocents will be screwed. It will be a very big price to pay to being a few culprits to the book. True, a few goons might be convicted, but a hundred innocents will get screwed. Is this what we want? If we do push for this bill to be passed, it will be a big fucken mistake that we will regret two decades later.

When cops introduced the grievance cell for complaints about autos, everyone thought there will be no more problems with autowallahs. The grievance cell is still active. Only, the complaints are too many and the staff are too few. Over. It came full circle. The auto fellow will give the grievance cell’s number himself, if you threaten him.

Frankly, how does it matter to a citizen if a certain minister had fleeced a few crores and put it in a swiss bank? The guy never gets to deal anything directly with the chap in high-office. It’s fine to discuss the macro processes, but it’s more academic than pragmatic. If the guy uses only 8 bucks for every 10, and pockets the remaining 2, but does the work for me, I am fine with it. He may have a fat swiss account, but that’s irrelevant for me. So long as he has used the other share for public, it’s fine. So the point to push for is that he should be doing the tasks he is expected to. If that isn’t done, there’s no use even if we bring all the black money in swiss accounts home. I may have to pay 2 bucks for every task of 10 bucks, but so long as it’s a win-win situation, I shouldn’t have a problem. If I justify my giving 2 bucks, but expect the other guy to be clean, it’s sheer nonsense.

The Team (Team Anna)
I don’t pretend to know much about the team. If doesn’t quite matter. If they are upright, it’s great. If they are not, well, it’s nothing shocking. However, going by how it did in the past few months, the team comes across as despotic and shrewd. And why has the team been targetting only Congress?

Anna: He has no direct answers to any questions. All he has is references to his stint with the Army, as if it’s a qualification in itself for saving the country, or hyperbole. He believes flogging is right. An idealist. When someone slaps Pawar, he quips, “only one!?” on national television. Complete with a Nehruvian cap, he assumes a grandfatherly role and talks in the tone of “my way or highway”. This man is the Gandhian saviour? The most surprising point is that even The Economist had praised him! If Anna was a young chap in tees and jeans, would the media and the masses have taken him as seriously, even if he was as earnest, if not more? It’s not by accident that Kejriwal is not at the helm.

Kejriwal: Did a fabulous job about RTI. IIT, Magsaysay and all that. Brilliant! But Lokpal is a different ball game, sorry. His illogical statements about congress goons have made a few writers doubt the standing of the IIT joint entrance exam! That says it all.

Kiran Bedi: Magsaysay again. Great. Give another and ask her to be happy with her guest lectures, inflated bills, and her organisation. If she really believes she is up against corruption, she should first understand what ‘entitled’ implies. If I am entitled for second-class AC fare, it just means that that’s the maximum I can avail of. It doesn’t mean I can claim by default, even when I travel sleeper-class. To come up with the reason that, “but I have been using that excess for running my charity organisation”, is a fucken sick excuse. Simply put, to claim more than my spend amounts to corruption. If all the corrupt come with the same excuse that they inflated the bills to use the excess for their family, extended family, relations, neighbours and social service, will we accept it, as we accepted Bedi’s? If we so generously accepted Bedi’s, why do we have a problem with the goons?

It is these people that we put faith in? No wonder country has gone to the dogs!

Stalemate
We have bills and rules aplenty. As good as they come. Enough! We don’t need more. What we need is that the extant rules are implemented fairly and objectively. We have enough teams and groups. Another team is redundant. If we go on adding supercop bodies, there’ll be no end to it. We need to push for accountability and responsiveness of the state. Black money is a secondary issue. The country isn’t bankrupt. It’s sitting on a huge pile of cash. The goons spend crores for just dinners over inconsequential sessions. We need to push that the existing money is used judiciously. We need to push that the goons be stripped away off all privileges. Cut the crap of VIPs and VVIPs and VVVIPs. Everybody is important. They better realise they are just doing a job like anyone else and not doing some fucken favour.

The needs of documentation and layers of approval are infinite. The common man gets sick of this. The poor get sick of this. This is the problem. Cut the layers. Simplify the processes. Make them more transparent. Hire more people to expedite the process, not to further complicate. Incentivise the employees on the basis of efficiency, not on the basis of targets. Importantly, incentivise. Make the transactions off cash. Reward the employees with commissions. Mandate that the goons visit their constituency at least once every month. Mandate them to design KRAs and status updates every quarter. Appraise the goons, and fire them if they don’t meet expectations. Teach cops and lawyers to be upright. Punish them more severely if they transgress or exploit. Expedite the trial process in courts, tighten the judiciary. Thousands of innocents are slogging in prisons. Ensure justice for them. Tipping informers for information is also corruption. If you cut that, what’s the incentive for them to crack and share the information?

How do liquor licenses work? How do companies win contracts? How do companies route their money through tax havens? How many employees inflate bills? Who is complaining about corruption then?

None of these is foolproof. For, it all starts with education. It all starts at homes and schools. But that comes later. First, if we must change some things, we must change the existing processes and structure and not add more.

Money is not the problem. Reponsiveness is.

To compare with other countries doesn’t make sense. So long as we worship success and power, and measure these on the basis of money, there’s no solution for corruption. Our system encourages private ownership and the practice of dowry still exists in the institution of marriage. Support from state is negligible either in education, unemployment or healthcare. So no matter how many such bills, people will continue to find ways of making money. Of saving money. For someone, charity may be an excuse, for another, family is.

India ranks 39th on the Democracy index. Content with fuss about shallow issues and avoiding reflection, we seem to be doing no better.

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