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Opinion

Fighting a fitting case for the corrupt

It makes me wonder what might have prompted that scholarly someone when he cleverly said in another context that if everyone had rather concentrated on the infinite and not on cleaning the drains, than we would have all died of cholera. Why him alone,  don’t we have scores of Bollywood movies with heroes playing sharp shooting cops, mouthing eternally the cliché of this rotten dialogue that it’s them who are doing a scavenger’s work to keep the society clean from the wastes called anti-socials, à la by physically eradicating them. In the media context, the same may be said of some overzealous neophytes with passions to nurture ideologies in the moral realm, busy writing moralistic drafts in the initial stages of their career, which no great editor would read and approve of. But then, like it happens to all the  people with accountability and answerability to individuals, institutions and organisations they belong to or work for, these rare types with their specialised cleansing mission (read with the help of pens, speeches and guns) find their perspectives metamorphosed once they emerge  out of the dark tunnel called professional internship, equipped with self-justifications, masquerading new alibis in order to excuse  the focal points in reverse. Who else but the media alone is responsible for the coinage of the new electoral phrase (vice) called ‘paid news’?

As corruption has been a successful theme on which elections these days are being successfully fought and also vainly won, the working of the mind of a common man with regard to the very many perspectives it holds for him with socio-moral issues and solutions, especially when he finds himself at the end of some beneficially privileged point, need to be studied by one of many hapless scholars who are fighting it out there for an Urgent PhD on the same already researched subjects for pay hikes or recognition. Many needless research findings of fed-up scholars are doing successful rounds on media pages or television news slots, which could have been curiously overlooked by a sensitive, alert editor, which I am sure are done away with by innocuous people with a sense of amused rejections soon after learning them awfully. Take this, for example – a  scholarly team in some Kenya University has found out that men with small members may have faithful wives. Alternately the point is bigger may not better, as they say in this case one’s wife may cheat on him.

This contradiction of popular knowledge is the point of attention and scholarly finding, with explanations ridiculously obvious even to a layman who would  in any case make an easy, leisurely guess such as this, if he’s to find one ‘maybe because’ to support the un-amazing, unconvincing grounds of infidelity. But see there are takers, Aren’t there?

Academic research, of late, has become a leisurely excuse for finding some rather sensational, contradictory solution to a problem which may not be a hitch at all, unless you make one rationally believe it actually is one if he pays attention to the findings. Someone recently found or more correctly has put forth a hypothesis which again is not one either. He says vibrations caused to the brains  by overuse of mobile phones is in fact good as it may  stimulate your cerebral grey cells to rejuvenate your entire genetic programming for better health, the  phobia of cell phones causing brain tumours finds a back seat at least in some people’s minds who have their mobile phones perpetually married to their right ears in all of their waking hours.

Coming back to the academic or for that matter, literary or political issues of corruption, study or no study, research or no research, everyone who has ever found himself in that typical position where he stands to benefit some un-entitled gains, knows how the journey and the course of struggle inwardly and outwardly have been for him in his agonisingly benefitting sojourn to material success. The pain, the hesitations, the ostentatious  expressions of a guilty mind while raising the hands for receiving favours is any giver’s delight, for he makes good the loss of his hard earned money in greasing the palm of the young, but corrupt ‘babu’ with a sadistically unspoken comment about him – chor saala. If the same giver is to give the same favour to the same babu many years later, the assault of sadism is rather on him this time.

Those sheepish expressions may have gone, being replaced by a self-justifying, system victimised brave, brazen face in a matter of fact hurry, which surely may be thinking, Khud ka kaam nikalna hai, Saala mujhe chor samajhta hai (he’s in a hurry to get his work done, but the idiot is thinking me to be corrupt). The insight, maybe someday, return as a successful finding of some fed-up scholar’s research subject and may do rounds in the media as a socio-scientific discovery of the day; trust me, there is at least one initially honest- later turned corrupt, self-justifying, system scolding common babu with tons of moral compunctions which have been trained not to emote when in moral struggle. And he’s assured he is not going to vote in the name of kicking off corruption from office tables. He has a considerable ilk and will see through the defeat of the bravados. Unbelievable! He rouses his mental rubbles, wipes clean his foggy lenses of high brimmed eyewear and says to himself, hum bhi kabhi bache the (I too used to be childish once). The equivalent of growing up is what is here to stay in many hues, and many shapes as long as these bi-footed social animal we call men continue to live in communities and groups. Once a wise old country man who in his youth used to be our school teacher gave me this free  piece of insightful counsel about the eternal subsistence of this one imperfect, un-ideological and  innate predilection of all human minds for that quick, extra flavour, also called corruption.  His ageing fraternity,  unlike the younger, whining generation Y, could not agree more. Me too, though I am generation X. But I lack patience to do a systematic scholarly paper to come up with the same  old  drawn out conclusion, which would convince you after it has convinced a university guide. On countless pieces of trash-worthy 
thesis papers!

The author is a scholar and philosopher whose zeal is to find practical problems to all intellectual solutions for personal good. He lives in Odisha
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