Long Live the Raj, the Raj is dead

     Long Live the Raj, the Raj is dead

Ghost stories

The English have a saying, “The king is dead, long live the King.” India has taken a straw out of the English hat, for now we too have sayings like, “Long live the Raj, the Raj is dead”.And no, we are not talking about the pale ghosts of the British hovering around in the hills and old Bungalows.

This might be true of all the other post imperial colonies as well, where the structures of exploitation have been readily 'indigenised", the local elite taking over what was the position of the colonialists once, not only in the socio-economic terms, but also in terms of adopting the culture, language, dress, food habits of their former masters. 

Our  Indian independence was the death of the British Raj, but then for the people, the Raj simply never ended. It was a transfer of authority that they saw happening, but the same sort of mentality, institutional structure and public dealing of the Raj continued, with “Desi Sahibs” taking the coveted positions of our new masters. 

People see the Raj everyday, seeped into the uniforms of the police, carrying the same bludgeons. They can see the Raj in the un-responding legislators, running on the orders of their party whips. They can see the Raj in the apathy, the cowardice and ultimately the surrender of their own countrymen. 

Even as the red beaconed cars pass, children would line up the streets to see which which convoy it is, of the Maharajas of the modern times. Then the offices of these ‘Babus’ would be unapproachable, just like in the older times. People would still be beaten for demanding their rights in a similar manner. What is the most disturbing is that this non responsiveness, this brutal use of force against the citizens, this high handedness has become the norm and no one seems to mind!

Orderlies and Batmans

Foreign observers are more venerated in our country. ( Perhaps they’re the only ones who are allowed to speak their minds). One of them had this to say, “ Ostentatious pageantry and grandeur of senior officers was an obvious, visible form of authority. The morning parade and the salute to the commanding officer, the armed sentry at the superintendent’s gate,  and armed escort on their torus were symbols that placed the officers on a high pedestal. A deliberate paternalistic style of governance was created in which a few selected officers took all the decisions for the people.” (Griffiths 1971)

This form of governance was required in the Raj to maintain distance from the masses so that no one could complain, this distance was required to maintain the dignity of the few thousand “Sahibs” ruling over the millions. Tiger hunts and other entertainments were adjunct to propagating the myths of the Raj, thus institutionalising corruption in the ranks of the police. The subordinate officers had to arrange all of the entertainment and shelter for the large visiting party, making bribes, commissions a necessary part of duty. 

The same traditions of senior officers are still visible in a new manner. Since tigers have become rare, there are New Year parties, picnics and official get togethers at “Dak Bungalows”. The expenses for entertaining the senior officials are still passed down to subordinates. The officers are proud of their association with the British legacy. In some offices, the ‘succession list’ coming from the British period are still seen. The same palatial ‘bungalows’, house the present officers, the baton has successfully been passed to the IPS, army, Vice chancellors, collectors, Secretaries of government… and so on. 

There’s a wide gulf between the ‘ruler’ and the ‘ruled’. Class hierarchy even within the force is strict. Constable and middle level officers won’t sit in front of the SP. IPS officers still use constables as personal orderlies ( euphemism for domestic servant).Army officers have a more colourful name, that of the Batman ( no one knows the origin of this one). Drivers, coolies, gardeners, helps, call it by any name; all of them are state employees paid by taxes of people, taken out of their duty to serve whims of ‘sahib log’. The poor Kipling would have been infuriated with the misappropriation of his term for the 'bandar log' ( the monkey people). 

Un-Azaadi in Democracy?

We know that India is an elitist society, but the superior officers take it to scandalous level. The blatant use of official resources in name of cultural traditions is rarely criticised and accepted, to the point that the not accepting these would be considered deviant. 

One of the bitterest fallout of such cultural practices is that the democratic ethos of our society has been damaged to the root. Public institutions stifled by their own damning cultural practices cannot get out to reform themselves. We know that the police needs autonomy, needs an independent investigation department, we know that the IAS needs lateral entry, mid career checks for incompetent officers, we know that the army needs to be organised on more egalitarian lines without breaking it into regional silos, we know that the politicians need to stop interfering in every association/governing body/regulatory organisations. 

There are sporadic outburst of public disgust against the obsolete system. We saw the effects of it in the Anna Hazare’s movement and more recently in the JNU fracas. The consciousness of the people transcended the grumbling in bedrooms to the streets. Against the lathi charge, reminiscent of those six decades back, people demanded their ‘Azaadi’, the freedom to practice their religion, to live with their sexual orientation, to have justice, to be protected against discretion, to have accountability and to implement the constitution that we have given to ourselves. 

 Our sleeping destiny can awake only if implement what  we already know, that the ‘we’ the people of India should realise the power in our hand and exercise it by voting for the right candidate and civil society organisations. Our Independence didn’t come from the top, and our ‘Azaadi’ can’t come from the top, it has to come from within.

The only problem is then, that why do the people of one nation possess the ability and the will to wake up from their slumber and break the chains of the powerful few and why do others not do so and even if they do, they place someone else in that place. Is it the culture that's to be held responsible, or is it the geography, the religion, the race... what is it that allows the essential spark of men to flower and come alive in form of collective progress of a nation? 

Land Acquisition in a Modern State

Domain specificity.

 These two words are enough to explain it all. The misery of the farmer, the problems of land acquisition and the greed of the businessman. The odd thing about the aquisition is that no matter how far apart the two poles of the deal appear to be, they are essentially the same side of different coins. Or was it different sides of the same coin. Does it matter, if you get the gist?

Two parties are involved in the land aquisition business, the land taker and the takee ( a neoligism). The farmer (takee) has been working for years, if not centuries on the same piece of land. The intrinsic property of the soil, the minor fluctuations of the weather and knowledge of a host of local factors determine his ability to put his land to profitable use. The businessman does the same job, assessing intrinsic market value, gauge the minor fluctuations of the stock and credit markets, knowledge of a host of other factors to put his ability to put his resources to a profitable etc.

One shouldn’t bellitle the efforts of the farmer who is just as much of an entrepreneur as the businessman, if not more. The only difference is perhaps that of margins and that of the resources available. The businessman is able to outbid the farmer and not vice versa. In the end it all comes down to the output that a piece of land can achieve.

This story is older and is perhaps a sort of quid pro pro. The land that originally belonged to the hunter gatherers was taken over by the farmers.The hunter gatherer that the farmers displaced would have required twenty times the amount of land that the farmer did for the same level of food resources. The industrialist would require some 400 times less. The hunter gatherer has been avenged, the cycle of development continues and farmers would one day become extinct just as they killed off the hunters. 

To be honest though, we don’t really care about the farmers do we? If we only had humanitarian considerations in our minds, then help of some sort would have been forthcoming for the landless labrourers, who are the real losers in any deal of land aquisition. We care about our own food getting expensive, we are worried that one day, there wouldn’t be enough food for all of us to go by and we all know what happens when there isn’t enough food to run a densely packed metropolitian city. The people start leaving of course and settling again in the rural areas. You weren’t thinking of cannabilistic wars were you?

Government tries to support the farmers. They try incentives, subsidies and then a uniquely Indian phenomenon…. loan waivers ( which of course benefit the rich farmers the most). The upshot of all this is, that like an ailing patient kept on drugs, the agricultural sector too has been surviving on the tetherhooks. World over the governments don’t want to realise the painful fact that for the most part, the days of massive labour oriented agriculture are over. In an industrial world, where we consume everything on the industrial scale, the need of the hour is to have industrial level farms. 

It is here that the energies of private companies need to be diverted. Corporate run farms, with huge R&D and competitive markets that rewards the most efficient. This vision might horrify some with the prospects of grasp of profit hungry Blackberry boys on the vital issue of food security, but this picture isn’t too far from the on ground reality. The supply of the fertilizers, seeds, equipments and technical know how is already managed by these ‘companies’. As agriculture becomes unsustainable for the smaller farmers, the grasp of rich farmers would only increase. The climate shocks, the vast amount of R&D required would ultimately lead us there. 

The very first ‘wars’ in the true sense were fought by the hunter gatherer groups against the farmers .The hunter gatherers were trying to defend their turf upon which they had survived for thousands of years. The entire ecosystem was kept in balance by consuming only as much as was sustainable in the long term and by having a de facto cap on the population because of a lack of ability to store any food. All the species had their share in the environment and as far as any environmentalist is concerned, it was pure heaven. 

The farmers brutally burnt down forests, over hoarded food for leaner times and with their primitive methods, destroyed vast tracts of land. They were seen by the ‘wild’ men as being just as destructive as the ‘industrialists’ are seen by the farmers and the scales are just as unevenly balanced.

The romanticisation of the rustic rural life leads to opposition to any change in the current setup of things. The farmers lobby is also large and would stongly oppose corporate farming. This story is true world over. Once in the forefront of food production, the farmers are now the very people holding it back. Land which once seemed endless is now a precious resource, too important to squander it by living in the past. 

The human aspect of the problem is just as important. The business men and the farmers being domain specific people cannot be expected to work in different domains, which is part of the problem in relocation of farmers even from ruinous agricultural practices. A compensatory programme for the farmers might give them skills for a modern world. Just like the ‘wild men’ cannot function in a city, the farmers wouldn’t be able to do so in an urbanised world. The future would come, whether we want it to or not, but the question is, are we ready?

Owl speak- Cannot circle In Delhi

Owl Speak 

Beggarly Indifference

Hollow Hallowed Circle

In the lighted corner of a darkened world, you can see in plain sight the suffering that never ceases to cease. A child getting his first shot of drug, middle aged one getting his last. There are well heeled people passing all around, some wearing Prada’s, others with their Gucci’s strolling amiably through the bright white hallowed circle of Connaught, where none of them can see the perfidy of humanity

It is for the same reason that the circle should be named the ‘Cannot’ circle, for it is there that light never reaches. Ironical it is indeed that under the brightest lights, one can see the darkest face of humanity. Indeed, it is only in our country that no one can see the plight; the people pass as if they are some other species immune to the sufferings. The bright windows and the glittering panes of the shops are indeed far more palatable to the eyes. The bars that churn out the costliest spirits cannot be blamed for the stupor that has engulfed everyone. 

The issue is quite simple, inequality persists in our country and so does poverty. There are people who are willing to inflict gross self injury on their bodies daily, just to earn a piece of bread and another dose of their crack and they co-exist with the richest clientele in the poshest markets of the world. An evening worth of shopping that someone does there is enough for a beggar to get his annual rations. The question here is not that one has worked harder than the other; rather it is the condemnation that a part of society has suffered and is likely to suffer for a long time that contrasts with the easy money that the other has inherited. 

Pinching the eyes shut

The easiest and the most common reprieve for anyone who looks at a forlorn face, one of the countless ones in the city is that “these people” should not be encouraged. “These people” really don’t want to work; that there’s a gang that is involved in begging and that no matter how much one helps, one cannot help enough. 

By labelling the poor as another sub-class of humans, what essentially is being done is outright discrimination. It is discrimination because firstly, you have made out the beggars to be sub humans and thus undeserving of ordinary empathy and secondly by associating negative traits to them, you are forsaking your duty of helping your fellow beings. If parsimony has to be practiced, then the least we can do is to be at least open about our intentions, rather than downgrading the already fallen. 

It is not difficult to see, if you pass through the alleys of any market for that sake in the entire country, there are scores of people lying around, especially in the night when they have nowhere else to go. A society is known by how it treats its poorest and if a judgment has to be passed on our own standards then we should not flinch in calling our society double faced and spineless. While we talk of morals and the necessity of a good government to come up, there is dearth of simple humane actions by a vast majority. While we profess religiosity and spirituality, we cannot even stoop down to help up a fellow being and the cruelty of it all is like the scar, which cannot be hidden. 

If there are laws for mandatory education of children, then what are the millions of them doing on the streets with large plastic bags in their hands and heads addled with drugs. If our nation was so outraged with the rape that happened in Delhi, then why don’t we heed at the rapes that happen every night on these very streets. Young children are violated, mentally challenged girls are brutally taken and thousands of innocents are sold for paltry rupees… and all of this happens right in front of us, when we shut our eyes, utter our respective God’s name and turn away. 

If you happen to be awake in the early mornings, you will see children passing through the streets. Even in the harshness of January, the barefooted army would collect whatever they can lay their hands upon. Stale bread, broken syringes, outdated medicines and fight off the rowdy dogs on route. While the speakers of temples, mosques and Gurudwaras bray, asking the faithful to rise up, these children take their bags of rubbish and recede back into the darkness. 

Paper Tigers

Like any other thing our society couldn’t resolve, begging too has severe laws. The Bombay Prevention of Begging act, 1959 accords not less than 1-year detention in certified institutions, which of course don’t exist. Rehabilitation homes for disabled, for poor and orphanages don’t occupy the same status as those of malls. The organised begging rackets make sure that the policemen don’t bat an eyelid at the activities, and a lack of voter id means that the politicians too don’t care. Even as lack of employment forces many able bodied and literate youth into begging, the laws regarding begging are not clear.

The laws that we have chosen to adopt are a throwback to the Victorian era Europe, where the beggars were termed as an eyesore and impinging upon the civilised society. The nebulous definition of beggars can include anyone ‘looks’ poor and thus can even include the daily wage earners. Under Beggary Act, 12 statuary institutes were constituted to prevent begging and to train and employ them. These institutes however are mired in pitiful conditions without being able to impart the necessary skills to help people out of poverty. 

Being Human

Perhaps, it’s too early. We aren’t developed enough. No, its far too early, we are not kind enough, not humane enough, not concerned enough and certainly not developed enough. 

It’s sad because most of the begging that occurs is related to the basic needs of the people. Sure there are organised gangs of people and sure there may be some who are too lazy to work, but surely there is also an altogether other side that no one wants to explore. 

Talking to the beggar to know why is he/she in such a pain and what do they need. To at least treat them as a real entity and not as a piece of rag floating around in a drug filled wind sailing to nowhere.

I don’t know how to solve the problem, to give or not to give, to blame the government or the society. 

I do know that as a human being I have a duty to help another when I see him suffering.

A useless circular argument

    A Useless Circular Argument- The Indian problem of 00 

Picking Scabs

Listing failures is like picking scabs, the only use of it is the pleasure derived from the exercise itself. Parallels can be drawn to our meditations on national failures and this habit of scab picking; maybe it won’t heal anything, but still the exercise has to be carried out for its own sake. 

Every year on the Independence Day, we listen to the famous speeches given by freedom fighters and unfurl the flag, while enthusiastic anchors list all of the areas where India has advanced. I feel that counter poise has been missing in the digital age and sometimes a light needs to be shined on the wounds taking their toll. 

Even though we have climbed the GDP rankings and improved in several areas, we haven’t yet been able to provide to our masses the kind of freedom they had hoped for. Our failures are many, ranging from law&order, education, services, poverty, civic amenities, grassroots democracy etc. For now, let’s focus on some of the more important ones which have repercussions and interlinking with all the other areas as well. 

The biggest failure of our state in the nearly seven decades of independence has to be the wretched condition of a huge chunk of our citizenry, who make it by with the bare minimum. The Nehru-Mahanolobis industrialisation plan had put industries as the prime moving force of our economy and excluded the vast underprivileged, undereducated and undereverything population that has had to eke out a meagre existence at the mercy of the ‘sarkaar’. 

It is as much a philosophical question as it is a technical one regarding the aim of our progress. Gandhiji had derided progress without compassion as the biggest threat to the people who inhabit this nation. He had viewed the wealth of the rich as a responsibility that they owed to the society. But, in a modern world, purely socialistic economic principles have long been shown to be useless for their purported ends. The more important question is that why haven’t be able to have an equitable process of progress? 

The answer is also our second greatest failure. The failure of the Indian state to provide quality education to it’s masses is not only the result of years of corruption administrators, but it’s also a gross negligence amounting to criminal wastage of our huge human resources. Since we didn’t have capital or skills requisite for industrial revolution, we ought to have developed our human resources first. Uneducated masses became a burden rather than a boon and year after year we have used them only to beat population growth records. 

Blaming UGC, bureaucrats, imperialists is a common refrain, but the present reality demands it’s own explanation. Why haven’t we been able to learn, reorient and upgrade our educational setup after so many decades of abject policy failures and ineptitude? The more important question is that why hasn’t democracy worked to propel leaders to give us an adequate educational policy? 

Deeper Into Morasses

Vexing questions require more than what scratching of surface can achieve. We need a more comprehensive systemic analysis, for if we begin to look at the many endeavours that our subsequent governments have taken and the failure rate of various policies, we should have been able to find also an equal number of out of job politicians and administrators who were responsible for the corruption and ineptitude, but sadly we don’t. 

Now again if we look back to our evolution since our first Independence Day, we’d see a unique pattern of growth, a pattern that can explain away many of our present problems. Even though we became a democracy, with civil rights for everyone and constitutional institutions to protect them; we were somehow unable to fulfil the first mandate of independence, freedom for our masses. 

Freedom entails not only the removal of foreign yolk, but also the provision of such facilities and requisite environment for personal growth. Freedom means that each and every individual has the power to make choices and to guide his/her own life. Freedom, for much of India means merely the freedom from poverty, hunger and injustice and India hasn’t been able to give them that. 

Uneducated masses voting for corrupt politicians, who in turn control and corrupt the administration and who in turn enable the corrupt politicians to perpetuate their rule and make even more money is a short description of the entire gamut of our problems. There is no incentive to be honest as the institutions themselves are fundamentally flawed in their raison d’être. 

Ever since our Sardar Patel decided to continue with the services of the Imperial civil servants and their ‘steel frame’ was allowed to remain intact, we have also unwittingly adopted the philosophy and mindset of the colonial masters while governing the country. The philosophy of regulations and maintenance of law and order is different from that of governance. While one entails controlling the population at any cost towards some end decided by the state’s leaders, the other is fundamentally about ascertaining what the people want and how to best deliver it to them. 

Toxic Equilibrium

The dichotomy between what the people want and what the leaders set about to give them has only widened over the years. The people living in Naxal areas never wanted toxic pollution and uprooting of their sacred forests, the farmers didn’t want to live at the mercy of exploitative Ahatiyas, the vast population of unemployable youth didn’t want to eke out a miserable living doing low end jobs. The politicians did want stifling control over every institution, the old business housed did want to retain their monopolies, the bureaucrats did want complex rules. 

What I want to say is that there has always been a set of people who’ve gained from failures, as if an equilibrium has been maintained to benefit some at the cost of others. The real question is then to how to reset this toxic state of things, so that the people can benefit? 

The problem has to be systemic, for if it wasn’t, then the efforts of so many well intentioned officers, politicians, agitators wouldn’t have gone to waste. The solution too has to be systematically derived. If simply the people voted out those politicians who are corrupt and thus enforced their constitutionally given rights, then the problem would be sorted out over time.

The  problem is that the people are themselves uneducated and therefore also unable to take rational choices for their own good. But first we must improve their wretched condition, before they can invest in education, which brings us back to our initial argument of improving the governance to provide the requisite resources for the people to improve. 

Mirroring Problems

It needs sustained efforts of the civic society to spread this awareness, but our fragmented society has prevented the rise of a wide based secular people’s movement. The reality is that the vast majority of the people are themselves dogmatic, insular and not in the favour of social equity. Every section of our populace wants to raise their own position in the heirarchy, to seek special powers and favours and to increase it’s own prestige and not to level the field itself.

Rumi had said that the fault that we see in others are actually our own. Maybe the spectre of evil politicians and bureaucrats is a front for our own failings to develop an inclusive mentality, to not ascribe to equal rights, to follow the rules we expect others to follow and to show fraternity for our fellow citizens, the same which we expect them to show us. 

 The educated haven’t shed their prejudices, just found new avenues to base them upon, almost every Indian cheats on taxes depriving the state of resources to take action, almost everyone bribes their way out of the punishments required to maintain law and order, almost everyone gives colludes with the corrupt system while loudly denouncing the loss of morality.

Picking scabs doesn’t heal them, maybe it even perpetuates them, but there’s a pleasure in doing that isn’t there? Because sometimes, unless it hurts, we cannot determine if the wound has healed or not.

Project Freedom

Freedom - this might be one of the most powerful words ever coined. With the help of a few alphabets it represents an indefatigable urge of a living being. I’ve never heard of something that conveys so much passion in so few letters. 

Freedom, almost seems like a magic word to me. There’s nothing that a man can or should value more and there I violated my own principle by imposing my idea on you, or did I ? For you too have a brain and may very well decide that it is love which is the most important value of all, or hard work you might say ( if you live in China). But I too have a freedom to let my own views out and therefore, the onus is upon the receptor to judge my statement and then to accept it or not only after due deliberations.

The fact of the matter is that there are a very few people who actually analyse what is happening to them and are thus even capable of evaluating all the dimensions of freedom and what it really means. What is it and who is stopping whom? Is it then an affirmative right or is it some sort of a restriction on one party to not violate the rights of the other. 

My actions, the one that I supposedly am performing completely free of any influence whatsoever, might in reality be the expression of the social values that have been forced upon me from my childhood. There is a search for a characteristic ‘me’ in the life of every individual and the tid bits of information that comprises this basic question cannot be procured separately from the society that we live in. The whole of our existence is shaped by the lens that we adopt for viewing and filtering all the information that gets to us, is it not therefore implied that a part of us is also the society that we lived in? 

That might be an obvious statement. But, then let us take it further. Are we therefore not defined by the people surrounding us, for it is their thought patterns that we ultimately are going to imbibe and then shape our incoming stimuli through. 

The unlimited expression of any individual is thus a myth, as much of a myth as is the existence of big foot. Apparently every one of us only has had small feet. The fixture on individual right to freedom has been a part of the modern discourse. The label of mad is given to anyone who deviates a certain degree from the norm, even he/she does it for the expression of their true selves. It’s not surprising that it is the people who’s job is to analyse their own emotions that are regarded as the most ‘weird’ or even as mad. Artists, the expression of the bare human soul are not likely to fit with any one size system. 

They are the people who’ve had the courage to dissociate from the popular trends and then to delve into their own minds. Artists have therefore been able to change how people think about themselves by being able to insert their own touch into the general. Acceptance of a particular trait is preceded by ridicule and then a grudged allowance. 

For freedom to be expressed, courage is the foremost requirement. Courage to be yourself is a difficult job, as it robs the people of an easy characterisation matrix that they’ve been using. For knowing an individual, especially a unique one, it requires years and years of interaction and experience. It is here that the heuristics serve their purpose. 

The point that I’m trying to make is that a life not analysed isn’t free, for you are falling for the popularly established forms of perception and judgement making. Not only that, in your daily life, all the decisions that you make are going to be derived from an external framework, which might be that of the religion that you follow, or that imposed by your parents, or that of your peers or whatever. If you don’t analyse the why of your life, your life also remains a big question mark. 

Not that everyone does care. I don’t think most of the people want to care and the others can… but still if I was the only one who could see the chains that the people drag at all times, should I have kept quiet or put some on myself so as to not appear different?

Tender are the words

Where books are burnt and the mind is cowered with fear, 

where the so called doyens of public morality are given a free hand 

where the voice of reason is stifled with wild emotion

where words come out of depth of government rule books

And led into ever narrowing thought and action.

Into that hell of bondage, my father, let my country slumber

--RN Tagore 

Since the censor board, the hooligans, the shrill 'sentimentalists', the government officials are now so afraid of the dissident voices, or even the truth for that matter, wouldn't it be fair to edit the redundant calls of freedom made by past revolutionaries? Preempting that kind of an action, I decided to edit the famous ' Where the mind is without fear' of Tagore. 

I hope I will soon get congratulationary notes by the MHA, by the press networks owned by media barons, by industry lobbyists and by the fanatics belonging to every caste, religion or creed. Truly it may be watershed moment in the annals of our history. Already over the years, the ability to express has been stifled with years of subtle changes to law, with incarcerations and with unwillingness to protect the outspoken critics and so it seems only natural that we leave any hypocrisy of freedom of expression behind. 

Benevolent Shielders

Surely the infantile public that resides in India cannot bear anything that challenges the preset notions, surely it cannot handle anything slanderous, anything that deviates from traditional discourse. The doctors have coined a term for it, Outrage Violenta. It is a deadly disease spread by any sort of enlightening conversation. Recommended precautions are staying an arms length from any such person and gagging them as soon as possible. Culling is done if the other measures don't work. 

For years we have heard the discourse of outraged modesty and hurt sentimentality. Any unnatural ideas such as atheism, female rights, sex or for that matter any difficult subject has been banned for it hurts emotions. The definition of the rational man, for determining offence is now modelled on the victim from a Disprin ad. It seems odd that despite having a fundamental right of expression, the only expression allowed is the repetitive bleating of the sheep. Government officials have recommended bleating highly to relieve one self of stress and attain 'Moksha'. 

Learning From the Best

North Korea, or rather the Democratic People's Republic of Korea holds elections and describes itself as a socialist state. There is an elaborate cult of personality around its leaders with it's people believing the leader Kim Jong il to have created the universe and the weather. There are no underground literary critics or dissident writers. Foreign works are mostly limited to fairy tales. It seems that every one is perfectly happy there, gauging by the lack of any opposition to governments policies and ideologies.

The notion of a democratic state, the notion of a constitution, of police all amount to null when they cannot setup a mechanism to protect its citizens, when they cannot create an atmosphere of liberal debate. The expression of 'disturbing peace' has been used so often that it has become the automatic response mechanism in coping with any threatening idea. What is then the difference between us and a fascist state, except the musical chairs played in political circles? 

'Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings' said Christian Johann Heinrich Heine. He was proved right, agonisingly so when the Nazi regime came in power. This is the fundamental nature of ideas. If the right ones aren't allowed, if the wrong ones aren't debated, then hypocrisy rules and the most hypocritical ones get to rule. I desperately hope for a different future for our nation. But for that, we all may have to be a little less sensitive, a little more open, a lot more compassionate and understanding. 

'Going on the other way' is a topic too sensitive for Indian ears to write

Ravi can't be dimmed

In one of the best cinematic performances, Mel Gibson stands as the Scottish hero William Walace in front of his demoralised army and exhorts them to fight for their rights. The lines that he uses have since become immemorial. This is what he says as a response to a soldier who asks him why should he fight when he could run and survive.
“Aye, fight and you may die. Run and you’ll live — at least a while. And dying in your beds many years from now, would you be willing to trade all the days from this day to that for one chance, just one chance to come back here and tell our enemies that they may take our lives, but they’ll never take our freedom!!!’’

In the fight against tyranny, there are seldom such heroes which can galvanise entire communities and lead them into a fight for the higher cause, there are seldom such men who don’t care about their own well being in the fight for what’s right and what ought to be, rather than compromise and deal with what is. It wouldn’t be wrong to say, that it is only because of handful of these men that our nation stands today.

Mark of Honesty
DK Ravi was one such man. He might not look like Mel Gibson, but his deeds were just as worthy. The mark of an honest IAS officer in our country is sadly not the awards that were bequeathed to him, but the number of transfers that he was awarded with and in this case, the officer was a highly decorated war hero with 28 transfers to his name. He was also currently fighting as a one man army against the land mafia, and winning it too, gauging by the extreme step that had to be taken by them to control him.
The question on everyone’s mind shouldn’t be ‘who killed him?’ but rather, what has happened to us as a society that makes punishing its finest officers the norm rather than the exception. In the past too, officers like Durga Shakti Nagpal and Mr. Khemka have been taken to the books for doing their duty honestly. There’s an implicit understanding prevalent in the civil society that ‘too much’ honesty wouldn’t be tolerated and the price for that would have to be paid ultimately.

Cowered down Nation
That the people have come en masse to protest against the irregularities of this death just goes on to show how fed up the people have become of the corruption in their daily lives. The vicious circle of giving in to corrupt demands and thus further promoting them seems to have entered it’s breaking point. The problem is that we have stopped questioning these practices and we seem to have accepted corruption as inevitable. No one wants to be the hero and stand up for what’s right.

The ideology of ‘chalta hai’ is what makes the problem stick even after so many years of independence. The roots of the problem go down to the core of people’s thinking. Instead of choosing the morally upright candidates, the public goes for the ones who they think can solve their problems by hook or by crook. No one is concerned much about the ramifications of selecting a dishonest politician on broader society, if he can ‘deliver’ on the development front.
The politicians too, having had spent massive amounts on getting elected, want ‘returns’ on their investment. They encourage the corrupt segments of the executives to get their ‘cuts’ and have to bow down to the interests of the businessmen, the mafia who had financed their victory. From the ballot to the highest public office, the entire process is thus mired in darkness.

Honouring a Hero
It is in these circumstances that officers like DK Ravi have risen. They have striven to keep clear of the pressures of the politicians in doing their duty and given a big blow to the economic interests of the corrupt. But, what they have really done is more than that, what they have done is to give birth to an idea. An idea that it’s not acceptable to be corrupt any longer, that an officer has to do his duty no matter what the consequence, an idea that true courage requires us to walk on the right path despite all the allurements and dangers of doing so. Public imagination has been caught by this idea, an almost romantic notion of selfless duty. There would be protests, there would be marches, there would be an intense scrutiny on this case. But that is not how we truly honour our heroes. To truly honour them, we need to change our mindset, to stop accepting corruption as a norm, to strive like vigilantes against all the wrongs in the society. This we have to do now and not in our twilight years, when we have more than had our share and we take up the cause of good as a saving grace for our soul.

When it comes to it, dying on our beds, we would happily trade all of the years of cowering under tyranny of the wicked for that one glorious moment of upholding justice like Ravi.