Corruption within us

“People stood in a line waiting for the train to arrive; the entire queue was maintained properly. The time the train arrived and the doors were open, everyone had to choose between breaking the line and remaining within the line. In a very short span of time, one has to decide, what is right and what will give them an undue advantage. And here we see most of the individual breaking their line and entering the train.”

The point which I am trying to put here is that, when someone doesn’t have an option to get corrupt, he will always feel like he will never be corrupted, but the actual test of a person will be when he has an easy option to do corruption but then also he chose to be uncorrupt.

Corruption has become a menace throughout the world. Most of the elections are fought on this agenda still, we see no visible improvement.  Does that mean it is incurable or we might see it in a wrong way?

We all are aware of political and economic sphere of corruption but today I would like to take you to the journey which would provide you an insight about every human being’s psyche and how we might all be corrupted but the level of corruption defers from person to person.

During the human evolution, the mankind has to undergo a lot of changes and only those mutations could survive who were the best. Since the humans were not alone on this earth they have to fight every day for survival, sometimes from different species and sometimes among themselves. The so-called social institution “marriage” was not developed and the brotherhood was yet to be born. The only feeling which was there was “survival at any cost”. This soon developed a sense of selfishness for themselves and for their tribes. They started seeing the other tribes as enemies and gave an undue advantage to their own people.

Coming back to today’s lifestyle, we all know that most of the corruption which get unnoticed or people don’t even take it as corruption is favoritism or nepotism.  It is very sad when I talk to different people and ask about their opinion on it, the majority of them doesn’t see it as corruption and bluntly support that they would also try to help their relatives or friends when they are at such position.

The very next thing which is to be understood is that literacy or “the so-called present education system” has not played many roles in changing the mentality of people. The very good example of it is “jumping of red lights by high-end cars”. Also, it’s very rare when we find people following traffic rules at night. The main reason behind it is that there is no surveillance at night, so people feel that mistakes done when nobody sees you around are not counted as mistakes.  

Everyone at some point in time has been offered some remuneration or gifts by their parents for performing well in exams or any other competition in life. This is so common and people mistake it for motivation. But the truth is we all are corrupting our children to work hard only when they get some monetary or other benefits. This has resulted in a perception when people do not work hard in their jobs if there are no monetary or other benefits attached to it. Unfortunately, this has resulted in a huge economic loss for the entire world.

So the solution to fighting corruption would only be found when we could understand corruption at all levels. Still, there is a lot of research going around the world and every now and then we are coming across different spheres of it. The only request today I put across is that we all should at least sit for 5 minutes and think about the small-small corruptions which we did in our lives and could it be avoided?