Saturday, June 17, 2006

We the people of India...

Last week, I had the "Constitution of India and Professional Ethics" exam, hopefully the last theory exam (I said hopefully, since it all obviously depends on the results) of my engineering course. While studying for this exam(this act of studying normally happens on on the day before the exam), I realized an important truth; and that was the fact that our Constitution can be used (or shall I say amended) tactfully to solve most of the problems facing this great country.

Although the solution is simple, somehow we haven't even attempted it yet. Only Indira Gandhi came near it. She included the word "socialist" in the preamble to our constitution and made this nation a socialist state - a goal accomplished through bloody revolutions in China and Russia. Similarly, she made this nation "secular" officially, again by the mere addition of the word "secular" to the preamble.

What we need today is a further extension of this concept of amending the constitution tactfully, purposefully. The problem of corruption ceases to be a problem if we simply include another word to our great constitution - "Corrupt". The preamble would then be something like, " WE, THE PEOPLE OF INDIA, having solemnly resolved to constitute India into a SOVEREIGN SOCIALIST SECULAR CORRUPT DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC..". Simply put, this will have a significant impact on this nation not just economically but also w.r.t. literature, arts, cinema and many more. We will have books like, "Seven effective ways of highly corrupt people", "The Corrupt Indian" and the like. We will also see a genre of movies where there will be no evil since corruption (against which many movie stars have fought, although in movies)would no longer be an evil.

Another fight of present day governments is against people who do not pay tax. This can be tackled easily. All you need to do is abolish taxes. This, when done with the previous move of making corruption legal, will not have any bad effects. While corruption increases the sources of livelihood for people , tax abolition will increase their savings and thus people can themselves spend on building roads, toilets, schools, swimming pools and basketball courts. Such in-house(literally) sporting facilities like basketball courts can nurture young sporting talents in the country and help us realize the dream of winning more than a medal in Olympics.

As I told in my previous post, we can also declare our nation as "obscenely backward class" nation. This avoids the need to bring periodic legislations to enhance reservations.

As I said these are very simple moves (simpler than reserving seats in IIMs) that have to be taken by the government. Only thing is we don't have people in the government who are bold enough to execute these measures.