Thursday, November 12, 2009





Recognize this guy? You should.He stole 50 bucks from you and every other Indian. Madhu Koda is a typical Indian politician.Son of a labourer, through a set of a very lucky circumstances found himself in the CM's post at the youngish age of 35. And then over the next couple of years, he decided that life has been very cruel to him and he needed to get him some. So every rupee that was allocated to the state of Jharkhand, he proceeded to pilfer 25 paise , you know,as a little gift to himself for parking his morally bankrupt backside in the highest post in the state and doing precious little. Let us forget for a minute that his deeds and focus on the system he operated in. What kind of middle age accounting tools do we have  that cannot detect when 1/4th of the state budget goes missing?Are they sitting and counting the state treasury with a bloody abacus? Surely, even the cheapest software could have detected this and sent alerts to everybody in the system. Surely half the state machinery were complicit in this. Didn't anybody have the testicular fortitude to say anything?

The answer lies in our culture.Similar to many ancient cultures, Indian culture operates on shame. What is right and what is wrong is decided by society as a whole however primitive and delusional that society might be. Open a newspaper and you will see honour killings .Fathers murdering their daughters for daring to marry outside her caste.Villagers condoning it because that is the social norm. There is absolute lack of a conscience,self-regulation and introspection. Contrast this to western nations, for all their social excesses, operate on guilt. Each person acts according to his/her moral barometer. You will normally never see the mass hysteria and paranoia that breaks out here once in a while. Nor will you ever see a one individual committing daylight robbery on a whole state and everybody keeping silent. There will be dissent and it shall be welcomed.  Enron was exposed because of whistle-blowers who could not live with what was happening.Contrast with Satyam, where if Mr. Raju hadn't admitted to his crimes himself,God knows how long things would have gone along. I am probably wrong but go back to the Bhagwad Gita where Arjuna has a bout of remorse after killing people in the war and Lord Krishna advises him to get over it and that all this was for the greater good.Is this how we see our conscience? as a roadblock on the path to greatness? Our actions certainly seem to indicate so.

No comments: