Spiritual Meditations
Understanding contemporary India through Mahabharat’s moral dilemmas
Welcome to Hastinapur- The Mahabharata's timeless appeal
On the subtle art of dharma
Gurcharan Das
Prosperity has indeed begun to spread across India. Happiness, alas, has not. What blacken our days are the insistent reminders of governance failure, hanging over us like Delhi’s smog. I am not only thinking of corruption in its usual sense — of a politician who is caught taking a bribe. My anguish comes from something else—from a recent national survey that found that one out of four teachers in a government primary school is absent and one out of four is not teaching. Another study found that two out of five doctors do not show up at state primary health centres and that 69 per cent of the medicines are stolen. A cycle rickshaw driver in Kanpur routinely pays a sixth of his daily earnings in bribes to the police. A farmer in an Indian village cannot hope to get a clear title to his land without the humiliation of bribing a revenue official. One out of five members of the Indian parliament elected in 2004 had criminal charges against him; one in eighteen had been accused of murder or rape.
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9:56 PM
Moderate Islamist here
