Don’t empower them or you will be more impoverished. There is a meagre percentage of bureaucrats and politicians who have some grain of sincerity towards the masses. Their parents have taught them directly or indirectly that they are born to rule. Indirectly, in the sense, the parents play a supernatural role by possessing the teacher and directing him to instruct the kid according to their wishes. I have seen parents teaching the teachers to bring out the selfish self out of the child not Gandhi’s best self. Iskay ander ka kalakar nahen balki Iskey ander Ka makkar bahar lao. So that he learns the skill of jumping in to the tallest mansions wherefrom the bloody hawk could swoop down to snatch the poor man’s most cherished dreams in his bloody talons.
They do not tolerate a penny on a poor man. If they see one there, they pick it up like a bird picks a bug off the sleeping animal.
People in power do not let the free flow of money to all the sections of the society because they like ups and downs around so that the road leading to their doorstep is so craggy that hope loses breath.
Political position grants you powers and you begin to reap the forbidden fruit in terms of wealth. A powerful purchasing power makes such people the kings. It is said that in a capitalist economy consumer is the king. But one who has money is the master of every economy. They determine the prices and pay more than those who have lesser income.
Since such people have a good purchasing power they inflate the economy creating hurdles for those whose hard earned money they have robbed off in the garb of a white collar and they deprive them of the necessities of life. Hence poor man’s money breeds money at rich man’s house and the down trodden, as they call him, raises people at his house.
You can never catch the bars of the ticket counter unless you grease the palm of the man on duty. Once upon a time I had a file of a poor relative with a clerk in a government office. Just to create a rapport, I tried to remind him that he had been my class fellow at college in early eighties. He rejected me and my statement as an old wives tale and demanded his share of bribe.
That is gold digging for mercenary motives. Corruption is so much rampant in the society that the system and institutions are infested all over with the curse. It is an age old phenomena. It has found mention in Kutlia’s Arthshastera. The great Mughal, the British and our own history has multitudes of such vultures whose beaks are smoldered with such an unclean blood.
Even the so called advanced countries of the world like USA and Japan exhibit the ugliest examples of corruption.
Bribing in the form of money is very popular because it is easy to carry it and reach home safe. It occupies lesser space and it has lesser weight and can be easily carried on the soul till the doomsday when everybody shall vomit the dreaded secrets through all the available vents in the body. It sounds easy to carry the filth in the small pouch near the heart (they call it the temple of God).
Bribery is part of corruption and corruption is a broad term and can be defined as the perversion of morality, truth, justice and character. Man is selfish by nature and he is not satisfied with his natural self. He wants to look what he is not. He tries to cosmatise his existence and prove that he is skilful enough to transform his nature into such an artificiality that he looks quite different from what God had created him.
Ostentatiousness is a human trait which boils down to the corruption of character so much that man has lost the sight of his role as the deputy of God in the world. He plays four types of roles on ‘stage of life’. Some people live for God. They are some saints and mystics. Some people live for others. They are the moral giants -the great human beings. Some people are happy without reason and they are happy because they live. There is another category of people who live for self. They live but do not let live. They are the main hurdle in social evolution. They try to lend their own mindset to the generations to come.
The biological parent tries to be intellectual also. For example an illiterate house woman aspires her son or daughter to be a doctor unmindful of the child’s aptitude and interest. She does so out of spite against her neighbor whose children are in some medical school. Is not it perversion of character or corruption? Because they are grafting a doctor on the one who could be a poet or painter.
People do all this out of spite against others. Teachers’ main role is the assessment of the pupils’ person so that he is able to bring out the best ones out and suppress the unwanted ones to create a desired individual but no one educates like this. Is not it the corruption of personality?
– The author is a lecturer in Education Department.
