mahavidya

The current October 2010 issue of Reader’s Digest magazine sadly ran what they call an ‘open  photo editorial’ (p.44), commenting on how shoplifting at our malls has become really big in this country – to the tune of an estimated Rs.5,000 crore a year (that’s about one billion US dollars), almost. Shoplifting happens in other countries, too, but the Indian figure, as a percentage of total sales is much higher than, say, in the US and UK. India, they said, has earned one more dubious distinction: ‘the shoplifting capital of the world’! They also wondered ‘what the Father of the Nation (to whose memory we still officially pay homage this month) would have said about such a collapse of national integrity’.

I was reminded by this story of the fact that a certain girl – ashamed to admit she used to be a pupil of mine – had boasted, after going to college in Delhi, how ‘cleverly’ she and her college friends steal things from shops, all kinds of things from cheap trinkets to expensive electronic items, ‘just for fun’. That was maybe five years ago; I wonder what she’s stealing from the office now. And only a few days back I read in someone’s blog (another Delhi-wali college goer) that she has stolen books from the book fair ‘for fun’. Yes, say the Digest editors, for some people shoplifting can be ‘fun’. And they say there are even parents around who think ‘their thieving teenagers are clever, because the kids don’t get caught at their shameless (italics mine) game’.

A critical point to note is that all these thieves are ‘educated’ as well as well-off; they steal only for fun, or maybe out of greed, or merely to show their friends how ‘brave and clever’ they are. And, as noted above, there are lots of people from whom they win admiration for it: or at least, they are certainly not called ‘shameless’ and worse. Indeed, if you look into the comment on the last post I wrote on the other blog, you will see that someone has asked ‘Why should it be mandatory for everyone to be interested in the same things – such as books?’ I am sure that it is the same sort of (by now very numerous-) people who will say ‘Why should everyone be bothered about morals and things like that? That is so 1970s (or whatever)!’

In this context, I only wonder whether it is indeed a fact that there has been any all-round decline in national integrity of late, as the Digest editors seem to think. Aren’t fraud and theft and blackmail and lying and cruelty of the worst sort quite as much a part of ‘our hallowed tradition’ as the rise of great men and women now and then who have set good examples and persuaded a few of their fellow-Indians – for a while – to rise above the muck to better things? My reading of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata certainly makes me think like that. I have read about graft on a gigantic scale in Mughal times, and heard that even in my grandfather’s youth – that’s about 70 years ago –  the municipal Corporation of Calcutta was called chorporation (den of thieves), where nothing moved without a bribe. From Vidur to Gandhi, good men have been freaks actually, I think, who have in vain rocked the boat briefly before vanishing from the stage, leaving the ‘wonder that is India’ to wallow back in the filthy mire, which, maybe, is the only place where most of us really feel at ease. After all, there is nothing new about the Bangla saying churi vidya mahavidya, jodi na poro dhora (theft is a great art, if you can avoid getting caught). The only difference that may have come about lately is that people have become more ‘shameless’ about what they do, more in-your-face, even ‘proud’ of it. Until very recently, men like Harshad Mehta, Ketan Parekh, Ramalinga Raju and Lalit Modi were being touted as icons and role models for our youth, remember? Their bad luck they got caught: it is an open secret that countless ‘icons’ of exactly the same ilk are still sitting proudly on their pedestals! Who cares how they made their money? Isn’t just having loads of money everything these days? I have never yet met a young man who is ashamed that his father got rich stealing scrap metal from a steel plant. 

Our children get to know it and practise it, apparently with their parents’ tacit (or even explicit) approval, in school itself, the day they start copying in exams, don’t they? If ever they get caught, their parents raise a huge ruckus about how the poor darlings don’t really deserve any serious punishment, don’t they? And, as I shall never tire of pointing out, it is these millions of children who grow up, by way of honing their skills at cheating, shoplifting and other minor arts like that, to become ‘successful’ doctors and engineers and teachers and bureaucrats and lawyers and politicians and business tycoons, don’t they? So why don’t we at least collectively cry halt to our other national passion once and for all: that of forever beating our breasts about how ‘corrupt’ this country is becoming? Why not declare that churi vidya… will be our national motto hereafter, for one and all – and then find out whether a country which bases its economy and polity explicitly on such a foundation can survive for long. Which crooked millionaire wants his milkman or tailor to cheat him? The one universal constant that I have found in dealing with people is that even thieves absolutely hate it when others cheat them or steal from them; that's the one time they talk nineteen to the dozen about the need for morals! Why can’t we applaud those who are smarter crooks than we are, even when they are picking our pockets?

 Besides, why should someone who steals Rs. 50 be called a crook and another who steals hundreds of crores be invited to lecture at high-end business schools?