The last two days have been crazy - Anna Hazare decides he must get his Lokpal bill against corruption and it has to be 'worded his way or its the highway'! If getting rid of corruption is only about legislation one could wish away corruption by a swish of that pen! I'm afraid I have a completely different take on the issue - tackling corruption is about people not bribing when they are asked to shell out undue monies. Its about showing the middle finger to the bribe-taker, not about legislating against bribes! To me its a no brainer that if people refuse to bribe there will be no corruption!
Somehow, we as a people think its ok that we pay a hundred bucks as bribe to a cop to let us off a traffic violation but its not ok for a politician or bureaucrat to make a couple of crores!! This is hypocrisy and somehow we are ok with being hypocrites as long as it suits us. It is this hypocritical attitude about almost everything in urban India that breeds corruption and I say again that legislation cannot change the corruption scene in this or any country where a hypocritical people think only about themselves and not for the collective good of the nation or a people.
Can we teach children in schools to change their attitude towards bribery - I guess we can but it again requires that those who teach have their own attitudes corrected, therein lies a himalayan problem! Seems like we need a new breed of teachers to start the anti-corruption movement going. Until that new breed of teacher comes along it will seem like I was a fool to teach my kids that 'honesty is the best policy' and 'thou shalt not bribe' because all around them they see dis-honesty and bribery and then wonder why their old man was such a weirdo, so completely out of kilt with the India around him!
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