Corruption... installment two

Consider the first case. In this instance at least, it would be simple to catch and punish the guilty, wouldn’t you think?  You would be surprised. Both petty corruption of the pecuniary sort and great big swindles of the public routinely take place in virtually all countries of the world – the variation is only a matter of degree, though admittedly, there is very considerable variation in degree between what goes on in some African countries or India and say, Japan or the Scandinavian countries. Petty bureaucrats are offered, and accept, hush money and speed money as a matter of course just about everywhere, just a little more or a little less; businessmen in cahoots with politicians regularly think up one or other variety of Ponzi scheme. One reason this ‘evil’ can never be summarily done away with is that said petty bureaucrats, policemen and other keepers of the law are paid too little to be happy; another is that the law everywhere in all civilized countries has become too labyrinthine and byzantine to make even a semblance of normal life possible if it couldn’t be flouted, or at least winked at now and then, another is that trying to tighten the kind of administrative apparatus that could drastically curb this kind of ‘corruption’ would invariably usher in an intolerably oppressive police state (our PM has recently proved, I hope to his own lasting satisfaction, that merely replacing one set of currency notes by another does not even begin to make a dent on this kind of corruption), and succeed maybe only in confining corruption to the very top of the social pyramid (read Jeffrey Archer’s priceless short story Clean Sweep Ignatius to find out what I mean). Besides, it is in the very nature of the democratic-capitalist dispensation that a lot of people are directly and indirectly running after the prospect of big and easy money all the time, so how could things be otherwise? And from what I have seen and known of socialism in practice, it doesn’t make the slightest real difference, so I do not have any hopes in that direction.

Add to that a) the situation in countries like India, heavily overpopulated, a large part either desperately poor or teetering on the brink of poverty, where every necessity is in short supply – from land to water to jobs and health care and personal security and what have you – and it is only a fool who wastes time lamenting over corruption (unless, as I strongly suspect, they do it merely for entertainment). Every sane man and woman knows that you survive and prosper in this country through jugaad, making do, and a very large part of  that involves making money and avoiding trouble by every possible means, ‘honest’ or otherwise be damned. Especially when the lowest echelons (police constables, government clerks, petty shopkeepers, day labourers, rural schoolteachers…) see the uppermost ones getting ahead through the same means, and rarely being seriously punished for it, who can stop the former with either threats or moral admonitions? And so we have made a joke for public consumption: if you steal millions you are corrupt, if you steal only a few thousands, you are a good man eking out an honest living under difficult circumstances. And no one even cares to discuss that other kind of corruption,  job-shirking, which is endemic, and which, translated into financial terms, probably costs the economy hundreds of billions a year!

…and b) that in India at least, no matter what people say for public consumption, it is understood that in whatever position of power you might be, a bank manager or a cabinet minister, your first loyalty is NOT to something vague called the nation or society but to your own family or at most clan. So when people grumble that somebody is feathering his own nest and furthering his son’s interests, the real grouch is not that he is hurting the common weal but that the accuser cannot do the same (or as much) for his own! By the same token, see how many Indians are truly happy to see their fathers or sons being ‘duly’ punished for being caught with his hand in the till.

So are things likely to change for the better in the foreseeable future, and if so, how? I am pretty sure that if they do, it will be for the same reasons that some countries have become significantly less corrupt than others – viz. greater prosperity, meaning far fewer shortages of essentials, coupled with a much better distribution of income and wealth, so that the great majority are assured of sustained access to those essentials without resorting to corrupt means, spreading ethical education which stresses at all social levels regardless of age and gender that cheating of any kind is simply not done, topped off by much more fair, firm and efficient law enforcement. Do I have much hope of seeing such a development in my lifetime? Frankly, no.

Which brings me to the second kind of situation: where values are in flux, and most people, more or less confused and scared and unwilling or unable to think through every individual circumstance as it asks to be, simply go with custom and the herd. This situation applies in this country, I think, most in matters of things like food, clothes and sexual deviance. So a very ‘modern’ and ‘liberated’ young woman who normally goes around in micro-mini skirts (uncaring that her legs are simply gross, too) wouldn’t dream of getting married in anything but benarasi saree or lehnga-choli because her mother, grandmother and all sorts of aunts will be there; the Umrica-returned IT person will swear by vegetarian food as long as he is within hailing distance of his ancestral town or village, though virtually everyone in the family knows he loves pork and beef, and the journalist who screams bloody murder at old sticks-in-the-mud who publicly wrinkle their noses at gays will have a fit if her son comes out of the closet and declares to the biradari that he is one. And the very post-modern supporter of ‘open marriages’ does the same when she hears of a grown man having an affair with a teenager, because she has been indoctrinated in political correctness far more effectively than the Soviet secret police ever managed with anyone, biology, Dushyant-Shakuntala or Romeo and Juliet be damned. These people also go to see the Khajuraho temple carvings and titter and cover their children's eyes. More of this in the next post…

Corruption: how much can we live with?

A well-travelled Chinaman who had lived through the 1970s and 80s in India will observe wryly when he goes back home that in this country people talk as much about corruption as the English (at least used to talk -) about their weather and the French about their livers. And, in general, they mean as little, and care as little, about changing things for the better. When I was younger, I felt righteously indignant about much iniquity and sham around me – in part as a gut reaction, for I had become aware how more than one ancestor in my family had burnt his fingers badly trying to fight the hydra-headed monster – and read a lot of fat books, done a lot of soul-searching and talked myself hoarse under the impression that I was contributing my mite to the crusade. I have learnt much more since then, and grown quieter; I haven’t, I trust, become cynical, nor do I think that those ancestors whom I once thought to have been noble were actually misguided or silly, but these days I am neither so ready to condemn everything that is popularly dubbed ‘corruption’ nor so eager to believe that if only we were all nicer and willing to say ‘boo’ to the dragon once all together, corruption would directly and forever vanish from the earth. I have learnt that things are not so simple as all that.

For one thing, people are not agreed on what constitutes corruption. For another, much corruption is unconsciously indulged in. Nor is there much social consensus about how much corruption may be tolerated (for the sake of preventing greater evils) and when it is to be punished, and how severely.

Corruption is certainly not a ‘modern’ problem; some of its forms are age old (just read our epics) – perhaps they are only more noticed and talked about today, but our innate love of colourful fiction, scandal and gossip, now institutionalized, organized and disseminated on a vast scale by the mass media, coupled with booming populations and mass audiences, may have been responsible for creating the impression that the world is rapidly filling up with bad people, rather than any truth in that idea itself. The very fact that certain kinds of corruption have proved to be so durable raises certain important questions. Perhaps the critics refuse to appreciate and accept certain unalterable features of human nature? – but more of this later. It is also interesting to note that whereas certain indicators of corruption have remained constant over time (at least for several hundred years), certain other yardsticks have been given up more or less completely. As in Kautilya’s time or Elizabeth I’s, we still say that a man who steals from the public purse is corrupt, but vivisection is no longer so regarded, and sporting unusual clothes, if sometimes frowned upon, no longer calls for being burnt as a witch in most places. Last but not the least, instinctive hypocrisy – itself one of the most durable and reprehensible forms of corruption – leads us to condemn our fellow humans for doing things that we ourselves surreptitiously do (or would love to do, if we were not afraid): and so the great religious masters were right when they taught ‘judge not, so thou may’st not be judged’. They knew what sort of creatures they were talking to. That is one piece of advice that stern clerics and Mrs. Grundys do not like to be reminded of.

Well then, shorn of verbiage and cant, what does corruption mean? The word has etymological associations with putrefaction and decay; it referred once upon a time to clogged sewers, disgusting sores and suppurating wounds – people still say of foul play that ‘it stinks’. In medieval times, those who ‘sold their souls to the devil’ and practised necromancy and witchcraft were said to be involved in corruption. It usually pays to hark back to the roots when you are grappling with a protean idea. These days it refers to activities which lack broad moral legitimacy: it is interesting to note that any accusation of corruption presupposes some degree of common consent regarding where the limits of legitimacy lie. In my time, in this country (and more or less in all reasonably ‘open’ societies, including western Europe and North America) the most common accusations of corruption are levelled against acts of defrauding the public, especially through abuse of political power for private economic gain (business is generally quite as culpable, but not as frequently and strenuously condemned), and against acts – or thoughts, through literature and the visual media – of sexual deviance. Let us examine their forms, causes and possible remedies in turn.

First, about corruption in politics. Historically in India and elsewhere, men in power have always thought it perfectly alright to use the privileges of office to feather their own nests – Charles II’s courtiers, except when they were extraordinarily naïve or pretentious, would not have been surprised or shocked by the goings-on in the contemporary courts of the Mughal badshahs or their provincial subedars and nawabs. Their only restraints were the need to keep in the sovereign’s good books (which was generally quite easily achieved by ensuring that the king himself had enough money, palaces, horses, wine and women to live in the grand style) and to see that the common masses were not goaded beyond endurance by extortion and rapine into a general uprising. It was only when powerful interest groups began to multiply beyond the traditional triad of church-barony-and king, first by the rise of the mercantile- and industrial bourgeoisie and later by the trickling down of affluence and education and the spread of democratic and all sorts of socialistic ideas in increasingly urban environments, until they could no longer be fully co-opted by the old elite but had to be granted codified rights to exist, flourish and wield power on their own, that new moral norms about the public responsibilities of public men began to be laid down in ‘society’s’ interest. And simultaneously, as the mass media proliferated and judiciaries became more independent, more and more people started playing watchdog in the public interest to ensure that corruption, if not actually reduced, was held in tolerable check.

In the liberal democracies of the west, the movement went on gathering momentum throughout the 19th century (it is surprising to note how recent a development this is, considering that men have been living under organized large-scale government for thousands of years) until it reached a sort of watershed in the 1970s – there is some reason to suppose that in the last forty odd years it has distinctly slowed down, if not begun to be rolled back (we hear of living in an era of ‘post-truth’ and SPIN doctors, and there are murmurs about being ruled by ‘deep states’, and, long after Watergate, Donald Trump has managed to become President of the United States) – and, to the extent that the same sociopolitical environment was replicated in other parts of the world, including India, the same movement took root and began to spread.

There are at least four different contexts in which men (and women too, of course) may be accused of corruption. One, when public standards of probity have been clearly established, and some men are observed or suspected to be betraying the standards which they have been entrusted and empowered to uphold. Two, when standards are in flux, and the standards of one large social group clash with those of others, which the former are not willing to respect or even tolerate. Three, there is the case where we might say, in a manner of speaking, that ‘the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak’, that is, people find their instincts rebelling against politically correct behavioral norms which they can neither internalize nor defy openly – these are the people who most easily become moral vigilantes and indulge in witchhunts, ferreting out deviants and hounding them, deriving from persecution something akin to the pleasure that they can no longer get from ‘incorrect’ behaviour on their own part. Finally, there are situations where all the above types may overlap, and these are particularly nasty.

[I began this essay around the year 2000, I think, and stopped after the previous sentence – except for the line I have just introduced about post-truth and so forth. I recently decided to revive it, and carry on from there. So there is likely to be a sequel: I take care not to make my posts too long]

He's gone... for a year now

It's been exactly a year since my father left us. I wrote He's gone after coming back from the cremation ground, and Remembering baba a few days later. 

I wonder where he is now, if he 'is' at all in any sense that we can understand.

But of course, he lives on in many memories, and I miss him.

This is life:

A  moment's halt, a momentary taste

Of Being, at the well amid the waste,

And lo! the phantom caravan has reached

The Nothing it set out from: O, make haste!

Introverts, extroverts and my classes...

Let me start off by saying that the ‘introvert/extrovert’ binary is not as simple as it sounds. Take my own case. When I was a boy, two very opposite things were true about me – I loved to talk, I almost always had lots of things to talk about (one primary schoolteacher dubbed me a chatterbox), and at the same time, I was morbidly shy in strange company, especially when they were adults. With my friends (and when I was young I had quite a few) I could be chummy enough, but circumstances dictated that I was thrown upon my own resources most of the time, so most of my time was spent reading and daydreaming and swimming and watching movies and cycling around all by myself around the town. So where would you put me on the introvert-extovert continuum? As I grew up, I discovered even better that I could talk well when I wanted to, even among large groups, even on stage, and obviously as a teacher – anyone who has tried to coach people of his own age while still a teenager will know just how difficult that is. At the same time, I began to abhor adults already, not because I was actually shy any more, but I was discovering with ever growing disdain how ignorant, foolish yet opinionated and patronizing the average adult was (this included everyone from parents’ friends to professors and my nominal superiors at the newspaper office, and as I grew older, my contemporaries and increasingly people far junior), how quick to take offence if their silliness and ignorance and crudeness was exposed even accidentally (and more and more, I began to do it very deliberately, because I was touchy, and getting sick of such presumptuousness, and enjoyed rubbing their noses in the dirt). That applied very strongly to parties – before I was in my late twenties I began to hate having to rub shoulders with people whose average IQ, GK as well as manners (courtesy, consideration and dislike of noisiness, to name just three things that were becoming more and more essential to me) were vastly inferior, whose taste in jokes was poor at best and vulgar at worst, who were only constantly measuring one another in material terms and either preening or burning with envy, whose smiles were quite apparently plastic, who scorned my success and scoffed at my failure, who would never be of any use to me, material, intellectual or spiritual, many of whom, I knew, were speaking falsehood and ill behind my back even while uttering oily platitudes to my face if they thought their ‘interests’ required it. So I began to avoid socialization as a matter of principle – the last party I went to in a hotel was in 1993, I can count on one finger how many weddings I have attended in the last twelve years, and I never invite people in any significant number to dinner.

Classic introvert? Well, how does that explain my success as a teacher, then? Thousands who have been through my classes will remember fondly how much they enjoyed themselves here. Some of that was indeed due to the fact that they found me to be a far more attentive, understanding and sympathetic listener than most teachers are (again, sign of a typical introvert – but then, are such people so rare in this country?), but some of it was certainly because I entertained them so much in so many ways, and no teacher can be like that without being at least a very successful pseudo-extrovert, which I mentioned in the previous post. So I am proof that it can be done. People who have seen me holding classes in thrall for years and years will find it hard to believe that I am an introvert at all. So all those introverts out there who are reading this, take heart: if you badly want to do it for the sake of some specific purpose, you can do it with sufficient resolution and practice, over time, though your essential character won’t change. I will always like both large numbers (but only when they are ready to listen to me) and small, intimate one-on-ones, but I will never be the life and soul of any party, nor do I want to be.

As for what happens in my classes. Ever since I started teaching large batches (by which I mean any number more than ten) I have seen two things going on simultaneously. You must remember that pupils come to me after they have already had nine or ten years of schooling at least, so some bad habits are, alas, too deeply set for me to do much about it. I keep telling them you cannot learn a language without speaking it, and most of them have pathetic speaking skills, despite the fact that they go to so-called English-medium schools, fundamentally because oral exams have never been given seriously in school, and because most teachers themselves speak at best a pidgin English these days, and do nothing to encourage English speaking in class. I want them to answer questions and ask them – the more the merrier – but most of them are desperately averse, either because they are too lazy to listen to lectures or do homework (so where will the questions come from?) and too uninterested in any kind of serious learning, or because they are morbidly shy of being laughed at by their peers: which happens only too frequently, even though the peers themselves are no better, and have no right to jeer and titter. Try to hold any kind of elocution session, or debate, or extempore speaking class, and they are desperate to hide behind one another; very, very few participate eagerly. Telling them how important a skill public speaking will prove to be in later life is like beating your head against a wall.

Juxtapose this with the fact that left to themselves (and often even while a class is in session) they chatter loudly or in whispers, incessantly, compulsively, and most of their chatter is pointless drivel – they don’t even listen to themselves, and don’t remember what they themselves said five minutes ago. I know, I have checked a thousand times. So what are these kids, introverts, extroverts, or something else entirely? Simply creatures who lost their minds and sense of direction and purpose a long time ago? I know too, now teaching kids whose previous generation was in my class, that most of them will stay that way for the rest of their lives…

There are a few genuine introverts, always – quiet, observant, thoughtful, interested young people – and it is for them that I feel bad, because, given the large numbers, and the distraction caused by the too numerous other type (I have to waste far too much time keeping them on a tight leash), I cannot reach out to them as well as I would have liked to, though God knows I have tried very hard. I know some of them wish to get closer, be better attended to, and learn more, but leave a little disappointed. I wish, though, that they too would do their bit, try a little harder to communicate with me. A few have, over the years; they are the ones who remember thoughtfully and gratefully, and keep in touch even though decades roll by. The rest forget within days or weeks of the classes being dissolved. My only consolation is that they pay their fees, and the numbers keep coming year after year. Maybe a time will come soon when I will be able to sort and sieve, and retain only the former type in my class after the first three months… for again and again, a thousand times over, it is this type that has made it all feel worthwhile.

I wish Susan Cain had seen some classes in Indian schools and colleges before writing that chapter. And on Teachers’ Day, after 38 years of it, I cannot, alas, convey a general love, benevolence and admiration for the student community any more. It has been too long.