Corruption in India

Slumdog Millionaire got Golden Globe Awards and nominations for Oscar Awards. Are we showcasing our poverty and fault lines, creating a strange lopsided notion of India in the West? Or are we pandering to their demands of inept India?

WHENEVER INDIAN books and films get such awards, Indians get divided; some celebrate that India has
been awarded, others regard with disgust that the West awards our poverty, crime, corruption and
injustice. Why the West awards such things? Do they promote our poverty, crime, corruption and injustice?
Do they want to discredit us? Well, let us think. Is it possible to promote poverty, crime, corruption and
injustice by exposing them? Have we become so prosperous and strong that they need to discredit us?
Why the West awards these things, there might be many theories, but why not be positive!

Let’s forget about the negative impacts for the time being and consider positive aspects of such awards. Of
course we have got another chance to celebrate as award winners. Why not thank the West for discovering
our deficiencies, wounds and fractures, which we could not see even living with them day and night? What
we want to see as an Indian in a feature film? A good and clean city, lake, garden, flowers, wide roads,
skyscrapers, beautiful buildings, palatial houses, actors-actresses in expensive suits - are not these things
our dreams, things that we want to see around us!

What the West wants to see as the reality of India. They already live in a land of dreams. Let them award
such novels and feature films. Instead of regarding these awards with disgust, let’s be thankful and treat
all our deficiencies, wounds and fractures focusing on them one by one. Perhaps the day we are successful
in addressing all these issues, we will get our dreamland, we will live like them. Of course poverty, crime,
corruption, injustice is also present in the West, but the extent is not the same as we have. There are
certainly crimes in the West, but culprit rarely walks away without being punished.

In India, a culprit rarely gets the punishment. Still if we think we should expose the West too, we should
go ahead with that. This will be a golden situation for the betterment of humankind. Where is the problem?
Problem is with slum-god’s dilemma. Certainly some of them want India to be a civilised prosperous
country where rule of law prevails, where there is no widespread poverty, crime, corruption and injustice.
However they fail to accept the ground realities.

We are far off from where we should be. We should not accept these awards with thanks only, but also
contribute whatever efforts towards reducing our ills so that the next time if anyone wants to expose us,
he/she could not make a feature film out of it. Probably we should understand that a society divided into
haves and have-nots, the way it exists in India, is not favourable for any of us.

Those who are privileged with wealth, education and social status do not expect a healthy outcome in
democratic elections from the starving masses. They should not expect good roads, schools, hospitals,
airports, good homes from a government elected by the ignorant masses. They should not expect a society
free from crime, corruption and injustice from exhausted masses. They should not expect that a
government elected by the votes of such masses will care for them, even if they are killed in deadliest
terrorists attack. The privileged can live only in the walled semi-sovereign private colonies with own
arrangement of water, electricity, garden, swimming pool and security guards. The moment they come out
of the walled colonies, be ready to pay the price of a chaotic society.

Even a cop on the road is ready to humiliate anyone and let one go unhurt if he/she is influential enough
according to the cop’s own parameters. Each of us is paying the price and each of us will pay the price in
future. Let’s not keep our eyes closed!

Source: http://www.merinews.com/catFull.jsp?articleID=15708807