Palm Greasing A National Pasttime

Long long years ago, there was a chief minister from a very prosperous state of India who had courageously stated that lets legalize the commission payed to bureaucrats and politicians.

There was an uproar in the city of dreams , few intellectuals of that time like playwright, Vijay Tendulkar who wrote original political film showing politicians and criminal nexus, Ardha Satya then prophetically said, a day will come when we will see only corruption hogging the newspaper headlines and the courts will be handling only such cases.

We seem to have reached that stage, if you open any paper and flip through television channels the banner headline is corruption.

Is there any thing done about it? You will find the debate that took place when our first Prime Minister, J.N.Nehru was alive and last two days speeches in parliament you will find, there is hardly anything seem to have changed in so many years.

It all boils down to illiteracy of general public who can be fooled easily in believing that we are doing something,however the fact, it nine out of ten Indians do not know what is the debate is all about?

We have not moved much in last so many years? We are having 9 to 10 percent GDP, local government is enrolling women in decision making process, but look at the standards of governance and standards of civic culture, you will find abject failure of our rulers, intellectuals and media organisations.

This way we may take 1000 years to be a mature democracy. While the fact is, others are jumping with the speed of inter net, we are still in typewriter era.

Poverty is not the problem. Poverty of ideas in the heads of people of who govern is a bigger problem.

We need to rise above these narrow barriers to make India click. We don't need plans to bring all 127 crores above poverty line, what we need is a smaller plans and useful things. Finish it and then plan a next thing.Lets bring only 10 lacs Indians above poverty line every year, that is better than creating 10 lacs poor people the way we are doing at present.

However, we are not good learners, so hopelessness will continue. As far as Palm Greasing is concerned it will remain our A National Pastime as long as we don't have a constitutionally mandated independent agency to arrest and prosecute wrong doers. Till such time at least both the parties can legalize the commission agents and let the people go about their life peacefully without feeling aggrieved.