Be Uncorrupt? Everyday?? Ouch!!!

I have been going through tremendous personal ’stress’.

The main cause is my recent resolution to try and reduce, and hopefully eliminate the CORRUPTION within me.

It's extremely stressful to try something like that.

It roughly went this way.

I wanted to find RR Patil and ask him - ‘How the hell can you have vital information about the attacks and not share it with authorities?'.

Then I realized, hold on, he is an offender. There is a system to bring him to book. Now I wanted to write to the chief of police (who probably via many levels of hierarchy reported to RR at one time) and ask him ‘why the hell can you not arrest RR if you would arrest me without a second's hesitation for a similar offence?‘

I’m not sure I can find the time and inclination do all that, hey certainly not if I have ‘deliverables’ and ‘action items’ pending at work that definitely need to be acted on, while romantic notions of curing a bigger system can perhaps wait. I need to get back to work. But I need closure so I can move on too.

Pat comes the answer - corruption, Anil, they are all corrupt.  You are not, hence you feel the anger.

Then I feel a sharp shooting pain. A voice asks me "Are you, Anil, really? Are you really uncorrupt?"

My peace is gone.

I begin to question myself. I beging to wonder,  if I have only chosen to ring fence corruption to only what our politicians and other more prominent arseholes have been blatantly doing, so that everything corrupt I do personally does not qualify as corrupt.

I try to assess how corrupt I am.

- Do I meticulously pay all my taxes

- Do I sift painfully through every transaction in every account and look for everything to report

- Do I always pay by cheque and always insist on a receipt

- Do I always wait for the signal to change even though the pressure is building up as everyone around is zooming by

- Do I never pick up a phone call when I am driving, and patiently park by the side and pay the fine if I do and am restrained by a traffic cop

- If a cabbie refuses to take me somewhere and I am in a hurry, do I never offer him extra money instead of just waiting for another cab, or ideally, reporting him to the police and trying to ensure that he gets punished and reconsiders it when someone stops him for a ride

- Do I never try to get by a security check with an article like say a nail cutter in my bag when it is declared as restricted but I think "its not really a big deal and I have no negative intent'

- Do I always refuse to be served first, out of turn, if the waiter or the person at the counter knows me well and decides to be extra helpful

- Do I always throw trash in a bin, even at the cost of cockroaches thriving in my car because I couldn't find a bin, left a packet in the car to throw later, but forgot?

The list is endless, and arguably some of it may not genuinely qualify for corruption, maybe just indiscipline.

But it's just that I've resolved, personally, that I may continue to discuss corruption on the face of it, socially, intellectually etc but ..deep inside… never blame a corrupt person till I am convinced I have become uncorrupt myself.

If I am myself corrupt, then perhaps the only reason I have not swindled you of your security and well being (while other bastards successfully have very recently - especially if you are a Mumbakar, and definitely if you are a SOBO, South Bombay, townie) may be because I have not been smart enough, or bold enough, and not because I am uncorrupt enough.

A miss is as good as a mile.

Corruption is corruption.

Be it bribing a cop at a traffic light or taking a thousand crores to let a shipment of death through my country's borders.

I don't want the next shipment to pass my country's borders.

I am therefore going to try consciously to never break that traffic light, even if its 6:00 AM in the morning and no one is watching.

I am trying that all the time now, and I never realized it can be that difficult. Especially at 6:00 in the morning when you are the only moron standing. I think I succumbed yesterday morning.

And every day is a new day, a new mood, a fresh challenge - every day is a new “Will I, won’t I?“

'What would you do Jack, what would you do?'

 Ouch!

Jai Hind.

- Anil