JOIN USSet a thief to catch a thief, the dictum may seem redundant until the wily cop proves you wrong. Springing upon you from behind a tree, dead sure you’ve skipped the traffic lights, while he’s been espying you out of sight! He pulls out his pad from the pockets of his pants with élan, the pen from between his ear and head. I can’t help studying his outrageous belly. Plenty harrowed I look farouche with indignity for having been hauled.
I am amazed at the alacrity with which he fines upon baseless judgment on merely fathoming the change of lights and you being naughty. The fine hurts more my sensitivity rather than purse. It melts my faith in the law than reinforce my confidence in policing.
My house faces a park, which was once beautiful, verdant, and herbaceous, it played host to many varieties of birds. Then a corporator with sandalwood-bollywood thinking decided the park needed a face lift. A walker’s path and artificial animals needed to be accommodated; felling of trees, which had harnessed and nestled many a fledglings was the end result. The natural beauty began to look like plastic surgery all gone wrong. But who cares! The bills speak for the work! Vendors adorn the park, while couples surreptitiously slip in, jaywalkers come to watch, mothers run behind their wards and indulge them with camel-rides, like they were in Rajasthan and horse-rides like they were on racing track. The mindless thing here is that these indulgences are perilous the children don’t wear protective gear. A fall could be fatal! Like the park, they too are exposed to ravages of adult ideation.
I watch all these on goings and wonder at the innocence of Indians. Somewhere there’s a young mind, believing that India is a player in the balance of world polity. Is that really true? Can you see that expertise in the dexterity of a chaat walah? Can you see social responsibility in a taxi driver as he inanely weaves through traffic? Is there responsibility at all in governance? What do the scams tell us? How do a few industrious carry the bucolic helpless populace? When we were young, we played police and thief. Naively we believed that good will prevail over all evil and the good will command the evil to punishment. Sometimes I wish life would continue childishly, and then perhaps I need not be apprehensive of complete mayhem, on the road that we are taking or the lack of collective responsibility.