Matter of opinion

There are many disappointments in life. People don't always turn up the way they are expected to be -- late for appointments, break promises, lie, cheat, and annoy us with their pretension, arrogance, delusions and stupidity. These human frailties are as common amongst men as ripples are in the water. People have sentiments, people have emotions, moments of doubts, fears and indecisions. Let us say, people are people whether they like it or not, their misdemeanors caused by their genetic composition. Anger, frustration, mood swings drive them like combustion drives an engine.

What about corruption? Where does it figure in the scheme of life? If you take bribe, keep commissions, exchange favours, compromise standards, where do you draw the line? Is it a disappointment or is it a crime? If people don't offer you help when you need it, if people kick you when you are down, they are not being nice to you. They have the right to endear you and they have the right to ignore you. You can feel sad, you are free to complain and you may or may not choose to believe that these actions will be reconciled in life after death.

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But corruption is more than disappointment. It grows in the head and then goes into the heart, slowly taking us into its coils, squeezing hard until our souls turn into vapour and we become the beast. It slithers from artery to artery, cavity to cavity, swimming in the blood, rolling in the flesh and howling in the breath. It rides on our vanity, thrives in our greed. It rollicks, frolics, arouses, carouses, mutates, and agitates. Corruption is one nasty beast that springs thousand heads.

We know about Midas, and we know about Mephistopheles. Midas asked Dionysus to grant him the magic power to turn into gold everything he touched. Soon he realised it was a mistake. The things he touched increased in monetary value but lost their utility or nutrition value. He touched his own daughter and she turned into a golden statue. Mephistopheles stood on the other extreme. He rewarded Faust with knowledge, wisdom, and pleasures of the youth. In return, Faust sold his soul to the devil.

Corruption combines Midas with Mephistopheles into the menace of a monster that turns the profundity of human conscience into the profanity of a marketplace. Everything is up for grab in corruption, everything assessed and auctioned for the right price, the soul purported to work on the same principle that convinces a woman to sell her body. Corruption by far is the most despicable sin on earth, one that is extracted from the filth of all deadly sins, one that turns mind into a snake pit where vipers hiss to strike at decency, honesty, and purity.

So what is wrong with it? What is wrong if media tycoon Conrad Black, who has been recently indicted, made money for the company and used some of it to for private pleasure? What was wrong with "Scooter" Libby, the former Chief of Staff to the US Vice President, who has been indicted for perjury? What was the fault of Richard Nixon, who did nothing but authorized a burglary to know how his opposition was getting ready for the election? Why did Gary Hart drop out of the race for the presidency of the United States because he was sleeping with a woman who was not his wife?

Answers my friend, as Bob Dylan sings, are blowing in the wind. If you make money for a company you are given privileges, allowances, and salaries. But you can't misuse the funds of a company which you have made profitable for the same reason you can't molest your own daughter just because you have fathered her. A political leader can't steal the wealth of a nation just because he has liberated it or brought it on the course of prosperity.

There are finer shades of obscenities which separate corruption from moral austerity. Corruption is deviation from the straight line, variance from the moral mean, easy to measure provided the straight line is fixed. Bribe takers, land grabbers, license seekers, permit mongers, political wheelers and dealers, power brokers, arms dealers, smugglers, hoarders, drug lords, and godfathers sit farthest from the straight line.

Then you have other protocols of perfidy. There is the schoolteacher who takes money or sexual favour to give good grades. You have got the meter man who will fix your electric bill for a little baksheesh. Doctors write false post mortem reports in exchange for cash. Engineers don't approve a project unless their palms are greased. Accountants don't pass a bill unless you take care of them. Reporters kill stories if the price is right. The neighbourhood extortionists ask for money if you want to build a house or run a business.

Closer to the straight line are the small timers, billing clerks, police constables, peons, office assistants, drug peddlers on the street, and traffic police who realise tolls from trucks and buses. These people and the likes of them indulge in minor infractions to compensate for subsistence earning plus a little more.

If you think of it, it's the same sordid nature in varying degrees, the same impulse of vulgarity that reverberates through hierarchy of wanton women from the society girls to those who stalk the mean streets. Our biggest failure is that we can't or don't like to see the similarities. Ill-gotten money is ill-gotten money, whether one sells the soul or the body.

That ill-gotten money reminds us of the allegory of a peasant and his cat. One day the peasant came home with a pound of beef and asked his wife to cook it hot and spicy. When cooked, the beef was so delicious that the wife licked it clean. She blamed it on the cat when her husband came home for lunch and the skeptical husband weighed the cat to find that it was exactly one pound in weight. He asked his wife two critical questions. What happened to the cat if it was to be the weight of the beef? What happened to the beef if it was to be the weight of the cat?

It is easy to track corruption if we weigh the wealth of our fat cats before and after they stay in office. People play tricks to hide their wealth, buying property or keeping bank accounts in the names of their wives. Wealth doesn't simply pop out of nothing. If husbands are clean, then wives are dirty. If wives are clean, then husbands are dirty. Both can be dirty at the same time, but none can be clean.

Corruption interferes with justice, which undermines the power of the people which diminishes democracy. It's a lot like virginity, character, opinion, knowledge, sunshine, and rain. Either we have it, or we don't. Clarity begins at home. Those who have doubts, look into your hearts. You either condemn or condone. Corruption can be anything but a matter of opinion.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.