Do We Really Have to Surrender to the Fish of Corruption?

“Baro barsara tapasya sukhua pudare gala”, this is a saying in the Oriya language which means “an effort of years gets spoilt because of a small mistake”.  I grew up listening to this proverb and grew up wondering how come a small mistake drains away a great effort. For a better insight, let's have a look at the below anecdote. 

Have you come across people who turn vegetarian only on auspicious days? I have a friend who follows the same practice. Once what happened is that he swallowed a piece of fish by mistake on such a day. He realized the mistake immediately. Biting his tongue, he hit his forehead with his right palm and said, “uiiiiiii….what a mistake I made!” As he was feeling guilty, to make him comfortable, I said, “No problem. You have not done it knowingly. Now keep it and take another plate of food.” What he said is something to think about. “Now that I have already eaten a piece, let me have it fully.”

This directs us to consider another situation. We may find some people who did not get indulged in corruption for a long time until the first time they did. Then they found it almost impossible to stop the noose of corruption from tightening. If someone who is known to have accepted bribe even once says that some practice is wrong, everyone will tell him “at least you don’t tell this.” This is enough to shut his mouth. The argument that can be given here is that if you have been involved in a wrong practice at some point of your life, this doesn’t take your rights away from you to raise your voice against the other wrong practices. It is never too late to make up for your mistakes.

These days on switching on a news channel, what you find is a story about Fight against Corruption. I was wondering whether these news-stories make it easy to watch for people, who ever became a victim of the system, who could not gather the courage to fight against the wrong-practices, hence surrendered to it. 

Therefore, NOW is the time when we need an example of someone whose conscience has arisen, someone who can come to the front and say, “I have received bribe at some point of my life. This was a wrong thing I did. I promise I will not accept it anymore.” They can comfortably fight hand-in-hand with the front runners for a good cause as it is evident that the common practice is to suppress the whistle-blowers by bringing their wrong-doings to the front. Afterwards, the number of people fighting against corruption will definitely increase manifold. Truly, we do not have to eat the full fish because we have tasted it either knowingly or unknowingly. After all, it’s not for the society but for our own conscience.

So the question that arises here is that whether we should not hate the corrupt. Why should we? The corrupt are like patients of the disease called Corruption which in turn is created by a virus called Bad System or Bad Morale. We would need to make the patients free from the disease and help them live in the society with respect, with dignity. One more thing - let's spread awareness about the virus and hope to get some vaccine ready.