Seven surefire ways to help your country go to the dogs
For a long time I have been writing, designing and posting positive messages. But today let me be realistic. Don’t read any further if you don’t want to know what an average person feels today.
- Judiciary — Make it messy with unclear laws, and dicey with rules and regulations written in terribly convoluted sentences. (Honestly, I can’t understand the legal documents such as transfer deeds, rent agreements and many government forms even in my own mother tongue. When there’s a dispute, you file a case and lose your sleep forever. It might happen that you continue to fight a case after you retire and may win after you have died.)
- Corruption — Make it so widespread that you accept it as part of life. Bring uniformity in corruption so that people know in advance how much they have to bear other than their actual cost. (It’s a pity to see that one has to pay some under-the-table money to get things done in most government offices. Everyone knows that. Everyone hates that… at least in public.)
- Skewed system of opportunities — Create opportunities not based on competence but class or caste or creed or religion, nepotism or favouritism. (Aren’t we openly allowing mediocrity to enter different fields of work? Aren’t we creating a huge lot of frustrated competent people?)
- Vague final responsibility — Create such systems that the buck stops nowhere. (If you go by reports of accidents or disastrous failures or calamities, you will agree with me that nobody accepts responsibility; whether an individual or a department. Shifting of responsibility is the norm. Whose responsibility is it ultimately? Nobody knows.)
- Messy education — Flood your system with questionable textbooks, slipshod content, improper inspection, frequent changes, mediocre stakeholders, etc. (If you want to start a school, or increase a classroom, do this or do that in your academic organization, you have to pay some fixed amount of money. If you don’t believe me, try starting a school or ask someone who has done so. The requirements are so weird and impossible to follow that you give up if you believe in honest dealings. Don’t ask me about wheeling and dealing in admission, recruitment, promotion, transfer, purchase of stationery and equipment, tuition, etc.)
- Taxation — Make sure that there are multiple taxes and lots of people are unnecessarily involved in the whole process. (You look at the books of guidelines in your chartered accountant’s office or look at some websites giving details of taxation. They are deliberately kept so complex that your CA will have no option but to agree to some unfair practice. You have no time and energy to fight a case. You succumb.)
- Politics and crime — Mingle politics and crime so that one can help the other at the cost of common good. (If you doubt this, you surely live in cloud-cuckoo-land.)
The above is the unedited draft but I posted it because I didn’t want to delay publishing it.
— Dharmendra Sheth,
Surat