I watched Rang De Basanti again today and my mind was full of thoughts. It is sad that today probably nobody remembers the impact the movie had. And there have been many movements since which have fizzled out over time (or so it seems to me).
I got thinking about the anti-corruption campaign and how it was doomed from the beginning. People were angry about corruption in India, but I think they went about the wrong way to fix the right problem.
Corruption is a word. It cannot be resolved by sitting on a dharma in Delhi and trying to force the parliament to create fascist like laws.
The reality is that since independence we have not really become a free country.
The younger generation does not really understand what the freedom fighters meant when they said that the British left, but Indians took their place.
That is what I realized when I saw the movie today, and I also realized that the real solution to India's problems is something completely different.
This anti-corruption movement should have focused on something very different than anti-corruption which actually made sense.
The biggest problem in India is that the entire structure of Government is still using a system which was designed to enslave and control the populace. Until this structure is dismantled and rebuilt, we have no hope.
What needs to happen is at the very beginning is to have more decentralization so that local governments are given more importance. Then we need the police system completely revamped so that the highest police official is a local elected official. Whether it be a village, town, city or state, if the highest police authority is a local elected official, it will become a lot more difficult to rule in a "top down" manner as is happening today.
No matter what we do and how we change the laws until we change the basic structure, things will not take a turn for the better. IAS should go out. Probably even the armed forces must be restructured so that there is not much difference between a jawan and an officer.
India is probably the only democratic country in the world where the different government systems like police and army have a class divide between lower and upper ranks and there is no way to get promoted from below all the way to the top. This is not democratic.
There is a massive surge of people going outside the country causing a brain drain because they don't want to live in this corruption ridden environment anymore. They want to escape. They are not leaving to make more money - they are leaving because they are tired of the corrupt system which makes every day a living hell for the normal indian person.
I got thinking about the anti-corruption campaign and how it was doomed from the beginning. People were angry about corruption in India, but I think they went about the wrong way to fix the right problem.
Corruption is a word. It cannot be resolved by sitting on a dharma in Delhi and trying to force the parliament to create fascist like laws.
The reality is that since independence we have not really become a free country.
The younger generation does not really understand what the freedom fighters meant when they said that the British left, but Indians took their place.
That is what I realized when I saw the movie today, and I also realized that the real solution to India's problems is something completely different.
This anti-corruption movement should have focused on something very different than anti-corruption which actually made sense.
The biggest problem in India is that the entire structure of Government is still using a system which was designed to enslave and control the populace. Until this structure is dismantled and rebuilt, we have no hope.
What needs to happen is at the very beginning is to have more decentralization so that local governments are given more importance. Then we need the police system completely revamped so that the highest police official is a local elected official. Whether it be a village, town, city or state, if the highest police authority is a local elected official, it will become a lot more difficult to rule in a "top down" manner as is happening today.
No matter what we do and how we change the laws until we change the basic structure, things will not take a turn for the better. IAS should go out. Probably even the armed forces must be restructured so that there is not much difference between a jawan and an officer.
India is probably the only democratic country in the world where the different government systems like police and army have a class divide between lower and upper ranks and there is no way to get promoted from below all the way to the top. This is not democratic.
There is a massive surge of people going outside the country causing a brain drain because they don't want to live in this corruption ridden environment anymore. They want to escape. They are not leaving to make more money - they are leaving because they are tired of the corrupt system which makes every day a living hell for the normal indian person.
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