India is a vast country , diverse in its people, in its languages , customs culture and everything else. However there are a few commonalities which permeates our society, and the most common one among them is ... you guessed it right - Corruption.
In modern India, the first case of corruption was first detected in the 1950s, in the Mundhra scam. The Haridas Mundhra scam, was a big breaking news in those decades . It had all the makings of a masala Bollywood film - A father in law at the helm of a country , the honest son in law who exposes the proverbial skeletons in the cupboard, the biggest insurer in the country bypassing its own investment board to buy shares of rigged companies under government pressure to the benefit of a few individuals . When the scam came out , it was a colossal face-loss to the Nehru government . Ironically it was also India's only scam which had at least some effect on its perpetrators as Mr Haridas Mundhra landed in jail for 22 years and TT Krishnamachari lost his job as Finance minister.
Since then, India has had many scams , including the Bofors Scam , 2G Scam , Coal Scam, the Sarada Scam in Bengal and loads of other scams. The common element across all these scams is that none of their perpetrators ever got any retribution from the law.
While these are scams at the very highest levels , Indians are very much attuned to corruption in their daily lives. Everyone we know have their own stories of how they paid bribe to some government official or the other . In fact the ever growing Indian fascination with government jobs , apart from the stability it brings is also due partly due to the extra earnings it brings due to corruption.
Which brings us to the more important observation, that the corruption we face in our lives is not just being perpetrated by people in power. It is also perpetrated by us, in our daily lives and is very visible in cities and towns . Think of the times where you have driven the wrong way , just because the next turn is like a kilometre ahead
Corruption is also rampant in our academia, where plagiarism in Thesis writing is so rampant , that UGC has made it mandatory for all universities to check the originality of the thesis using software like Turnitin. One can however understand , corruption in these sphere because of the stakes involved , Degrees , time saved etc.
Recently however I stumbled upon corruption in an area where the stakes are very low, or not even there . For as long as I have known , I have been a part of tribe called the quizzers. Its a thankless hobby , where you mostly spend your weekends and most of your free time reading up on books which tell you about useless trivia which no one wants to know . The stakes are very low, may be winning a quiz here or there . The ratio of energy invested to actual economic gain is quite akin to Mouse Milking - Which by the way as any quizzer will tell you is a term to describe "A task which requires a great deal of effort but resulting in very little return" . Most quizzers do it for the adrenaline rush of answering a little known trivia in front of a large audience or validation from peers about their knowledge and not much more.
Since India is under lock-down these days , like every thing else it has also affected the world of the quizzers . Most quizzers who would go around in quizzes across cities are now confined to their homes , which has led to the proliferation of what is essentially Online / Zoom Quizzes . One huge change which I have observed in these quizzes , is that the quizzes have become heavily high scoring .
Online most quizzers have suddenly become more knowledgeable , and questions which would have barely got an answer earlier, is suddenly being answered by all and sundry. In most quizzes , the answer rate is close to 80-90% . And its not just the good quizzers , who are answering , in fact in some cases the good quizzers are not answering at all , while in some cases good quizzers seem invincible and are answering 100% of the questions in a fraction of a second .
So where does corruption come in here ? Well you guessed it right . All these answers which are coming at the Quiz Masters hard and fast and from all directions is because the quizzers are using an organization , which some years ago urged people to "Don't Be Evil" . It is hard to win against Google . Google arguably has answers to most recorded questions and the right googling skills can get you the answers to not just textual questions but also visuals . So an arcane visual which most quizzers would have gaped at in a normal physical quiz gets answered at the drop of a hat in online quiz due to reverse image search.
So what is the point here . The point is , when people in a country are so corrupted that they use unfair means in even a hobby when there is little or nothing at stake , how do the same people expect their leaders to be uncorrupted. We are all corrupt , and practice corruption at our own little levels , whenever and wherever we can . Hence , so are our leaders .
To end with, Rabindranath Tagore had written a marvelous piece (well all his songs are marvelous ) where he spoke thus -
"Aamra Sobai Raja aamader ei Rajar Rajotye" - We are all kings in the kingdom of our King .
In modern parlance , it has translated as " We are all corrupt in the land of corruption" . It is not something which our forefathers fought for 73 years back
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