madness??? THIS....IS...INDIA

This is from a person who has written his last few blog entries with nothing like fanfare surrounding them. I have never wanted my blog to be a 'hit'in the conventional sense of the term, but this is one article that i would like to see a lot of comments on. Because that is why i am doing this, this is plain old publicity and an exaggerated sense of importance in a world where little that i do actually makes a difference in people. And of course this is my anger boiling out into an unseen corner of the world wide web. And now, however boring that was, please read on.

When you live in India you get used to many forms of looting, you know you need to pay a bribe to get a driving license, that when smiling Gandhi is on your side, you may be Osama Bin Laden for all the system cares. You know that India runs on money of the black variety. And we still try to hold on to the few things we hold dear in our country, from the idlis and the chappathis to taking solace from the fact that even if a politician has looted enough for him to live in peace with a (very) fixed deposit in a not-so-neutral country called Switzerland, which pays 3% according to Jeffery Archer, he can expect to get a one hour of restlessness and public humiliation at the hands of Karan Thapar.

As an aside, here are some nice numbers to crunch, as they crunch our tax away.Assuming he siphoned of 1% of the government loss, and at 1% interest P.A, his annual income is 1.76 crores, and i hardly need say tax free. Contributing a few points to the second decimal in that figure will be his salary as a Member of parliament. And we were thinking he'd fret about an hour with Karan Thapar.

And so we are all not surprised by this sort of looting, now a different strain of looting has come to surface, and this has managed to shock me, because it not only looted, it attempted to rob from the grave of truth. And truth is something i thought was important to the vast majority of India. It died and was buried the day we started worshiping our icons in the film world, and giving them the same power over our destinies in the real world. It's corpse turned the day we started worshiping a lady who almost turned our country into a dictatorship, not to mention her family. And today they rob its grave, they deprive it of the dignity of being thought of as correct by the average person. They refuse to show a woman who has won a lot of awards for journalism lobbying to loot us. They refuse to show the way the only people who had the public reach to challenge our flawed system now join the bandwagon dancing at truth's death procession.

But here's why i shouldn't be surprised. When you do something for 60 years, with a remarkable cooperation and an immense knowledge sharing capability, your product becomes good, as good as peter england shirts or Godrej cupboards. And you become immensely efficient at what you are doing. This is corruption in India, since 1947. After a point of time, it is the small chinks in the armour that you have to repair, and that is what they are doing now. As for the members of the media, they realized they weren't making great progress anyway, so why not make a quick buck while suffering no possible damage to your image and still being the "bastion of truth". As i had once said, people will always do what is good for them, physically, mentally and monetarily.

Now ladies and gentlemen, you are faced with a choice, you can either join the bandwagon by doing nothing, and therefore piss on truth's empty grave. Or try and climb the mountain with small steps. To elaborate, if you feel you are comfortable enough today, join them, there is nothing wrong in free, informed choice. On the other hand, if you feel that you would benefit from a future absence of looters, mentally, physically or monetarily. Let us climb the mountain of improbability facing us by taking small steps. What you find below represents the choice, take the choice, and you feel you have done the right thing, direct a few possibly interested people to this corner of the world wide web. For it is on the web that the whispers which will start this revolution will begin.

Barkha dutt Nira radia tapes Russel Peters on Indians