Friday, August 27, 2010

CWG 'shame' is fine, but what about daily life?

The last three months have seen cringe-worthy behaviour from all fields of our beautiful, huge, over-populated, 'developing' country. First the sports bodies involved with the Commonwealth Games, then the beauracracy involved with the sports bodies, and on top of it all, the press involved with all of the above, who outdid each other in claiming the 'first to have unearthed the scam'. Clap clap, congrats to you, you are up for the upcoming Peace Nobel for this monumental achievement. News seems to be the new entertainment - always on, unearthing 'breaking stories' hour after hour involving oil spills, games scams and Deepika Padukone's cat getting stuck up a tree. This arrival of 24x7 media hasn't exactly helped the world I feel, but that's a debate for another post.

So, as I was saying, there has been approximately INR 20,000 crore siphoned off the games so far. I have no clue how to type the new Rupee symbol - a symbol which represents our arrival on the world stage, our economic clout, and in this case, our unending corruption. It's a crying shame that the first widespread use of the new symbol was when those news items about 'Treadmills for INR 10 Lakhs' were splashed all over the pages of one of the above 'we saw it first' media houses. Just goes to show, you can change the symbol, but you can't change the people.

So now, unlike Beijing and later South Africa, the hosting of a games has mostly pulled down any respect India gained over the last 10 years. It's just been a case of the Emperor's New Clothes all along, India Shining, India and China, Neo-liberalization, all other associated bullcrap. And while all the attention has been rightly focussed on this monumental mess up, I have one minor question to anyone who cares to listen - What about the smaller people and the smaller 'somethings' that are given everyday.

Here's a small experiment. Someone please tell me the exact fee, as laid down by the law, for:
  1. Getting a driver's licence from a state-established RTO.
  2. Changing registration/paying a state's road tax (I don't get why the heck Road Tax is a state subject in the first place, but again, I digress)
  3. Getting a passport, including that very famous step of 'police verification'
  4. Getting a birth/marriage certificate.
Rates aside, I have one other question for the list. Why does it take, and is accepted as the norm, for an Income Tax refund to come after 3 years of the year of Assesment? I mean, it's the age of the TDS and NEFT transfer. I should pay my taxes promptly before I even receive my salary, but if I have to get a refund I wait 3 years? Heck, I probably belong to a very small percentage of our Billion+ sweethearts who even pay the friggin tax at source. The least that can be done is settle my accounts at the end of every fiscal.

I guess my point is that unless we stop this 'thousand for this saaar', 'chief officer will also have to be satisfied saaar', 'it will take 3 months to get this signed, but I know a way it can be done quicker saaar' habit of ours in our daily life, practiced by a million people every day, there's no point losing sleep over all those crores that went down a few very fat pockets in Delhi. Between us, India's famed New Middle Class, would've hit the total amount of the scam over the course of barely 4 years of our lives. We really can't complain about someone thinking they can get away with doing it over 4 weeks.
Sigh.