Corruption has over the period become a product of our understanding of the world and our opinion and expectation of how the system works or should work. While some are fine with a few things happening here and there others are not. The gravity of an issue of corruption is different for different people and everyone sits in his or her shoes and views corruption differently. While the efforts to move corruption away should continue, it is equally important that people also dissect corruption and look at all corners of their society that is tainted by it. If you look at this whole effort as a reformation process then there is more scope for things to change positively and when I say reformation I intend that people start it from themselves and move outwards. If you think that corruption in all levels should be removed, then and only then you will find a way to change yourself and contribute to the fight.
Once We win the anti-corruption movement, we need to build a society that does not allow corruption and that needs tremendous individual participation and the question is if are we ready for it , if so then we can do it even now before we win the final fight on corruption.
If someone thinks that they will lose something if they do not pay bribe to move ahead they might be wrong. If someone thinks that they have been corrupt before and so morally incapable of fighting it now might be wrong as well for they should give themselves the liberty to have done mistakes in the past. If one thinks that he or she has to end corruption completely and then start afresh they can again be wrong. If you are 30 percent corrupt, you can start today making it 15 percent and move on. If everyone decides to reduce their contribution to a corrupt system by a small percentage we might have a better system in place. This does not need arms, nor religion or politics, it needs every individual to look inside and act uncorrupted.
We cannot fight corruption effectively if we are not ready to change our own ways of life in a corrupt system and by this I don’t mean just India, but any society or country that you live. There is no paradise on earth even if one would like to believe so, every society equally distributes their own share of prosperity and miseries and so as we live in it, we should also be responsible to how we live in it. There are choices in our hand that we do not make due to many reasons that affect us adversely. We choose things that are personally positive and think that is the right thing to do. I sum up with what another friend of mine commented on one of my posts “A guy who does a small corruption is doing so because he is not having the opportunity to do a big one”, Corruption is in our minds and the only person who can change it is us.
If it is impractical, for someone to start personally, I think all your struggles are also futile; you might win over the government , pass bills, bring back black money, but you will not be able to be uncorrupted. We all sail a ship in which we are the captain and the only one on board and we can direct its course in any direction, we can choose to sail towards the good or sail towards the bad. We need to be aware of the ships sailing next to us for we all share the ocean. The Reform starts with us…
Categories: Articles, Opinions, Politics, Responsibility, Society
Vinod Narayan 
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