Tag: corrupt

Do Some of the Pillars of Democracy need a Shake-Up?

Democracy has rested on four pillars. The legislature, executive, the judiciary, and arguably the most important, the press. All the pillars need improvement, some far more than others. The world press, for instance, has really become dirty. When in reality, it should be a transparent communication channel between the citizen, the country, and the world.

In an increasingly connected globe, traditional media surprisingly continues to wield disproportionately high power. And it has been responsible for numerous crimes, the world over. From keeping entire populations in the dark, to convincing them about who the good guys and bad guys are. By encouraging unsolicited violence on other countries. Press has made large sections of otherwise peace-loving populations completely convinced of the need for war. Not always because any country was under attack. But because politicians and industry stood to benefit from tricking citizens and getting them onboard. And with business people and politicians ever interested in wielding influence over large media houses, it makes one wonder how we are allowing ourselves to be subjected to lies.

The Indian press too, continues to scale new depths by doctoring news or hiding it altogether, to favor various political parties.

Anyway, interestingly, the Congress, among the bigger corrupt parties, recently figured a simple way to fix the distorted media problem. After taking a lot of bashing by two leading TV news channels for some time, the party recently banned the channels from their press conferences. How much is a TV news channel worth if it doesn’t have access to a certain section of national news? Not as much as it had before, right?

Mahendra Palsule highlighted in a good post, about the fifth pillar in a democracy, the (silent) citizen.

Think about it. Let’s assume these two channels got a reality-check after this banning. Imagine then what we the people can, and must do, to get the press functioning the way it is meant to, not the underhand way it is paid to. The day the masses stop consuming lies served to us by these media, we will have withdrawn the right we gave them, and which they continue to abuse.

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Au-shitz.!

Au-shitz.!

With all the ‘do good deeds’ and ‘do unto thy neighbour…’ that has literally been beaten into our souls while we were growing up, I often wondered why some corrupt politicians and other people in power seemed to go from crime to crime without losing any sleep over it, and they just seemed to prosper at the cost of the common folk.

And I wondered about it all the way until about 20 minutes ago. Because that’s when I read this news article about how the German authorities arrested a 93-year-old alleged former guard at the Nazi death camp Auschwitz on charges of complicity in the mass murder of prisoners [Link to the article]. He is believed to have worked at the camp between autumn 1941 and its closure in 1945. Now that’s a long way to judgement, but it has come nonetheless. And you can almost hear the old bugger mutter, “Au shitz.!”

And while that news of justice is not exactly to do with an of our corrupt folk in India, it does offer a big ray of hope; that karma does exist.

Nothing better to conclude with, than the famous line on the wall from the scene in Shawshank Redemption“His judgment cometh and that right soon.”

what-goes-around-comes-around

What goes around comes around, by Mark Ward.

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