If you do sense a slant in this write-up, it is only an expression of my long-held skepticism. While it was refreshing to have concerns smoldering within our minds articulated at last, the discourse of the anti-corruption movement that metamorphosed into a 'people's party' was soon stained by a surety about the sole solution to all our problems. Surety, for within it lurks the phantom of presumptuousness, is a threat to the supple discernment necessary to fully appreciate the subtleties of the problems facing us.
To buttress this surety, once in power, with selflessness - one that seeks the constituents to determine the leader's actions by means of majoritarian preference - is to roll in the smugness of righteousness, while simultaneously abdicating the dutiful responsibility of remedying exigencies.
With due respect to Mr. Kejriwal and his coterie of cavaliers against corruption, he needs to pause and reflect on why laws were made. We would all like to believe we are unblemishedly good and capable of allowing the benevolent and ethical souls within to guide our behavior. But, the truth is, selfishness more often than not prods the pragmatist in us, who has to be reined in. Laws protect us from ourselves as much as they do from others. Yes, there are laws and conventions and protocols that are clearly out of date and need to be pruned and burned to ashes. But, to take the 'sweeping' view that everything that we have is wrong and ineffective, and needs to be wrecked before we can raise the grand egalitarian, just, prosperous edifice brick by brick is to be in an intoxication that cannot even be induced the drugs AAP's law minister and his henchmen sniffed. The police, in a rare instance of lawfulness - if you were to believe the peddlers of our daily news - refused to raid a residence without a search warrant, or arrest women in the middle of the night, what with the police party responding to the clamor devoid of female cops.
Mr. Kejriwal should have straightened his colleague for the high-handed and ham-handed intervention the latter led. To turn polemic and protest lawful behavior, accusing the police of an immoral intent to protect their 'patrons', is to advance the agenda of subversion and eventual erosion of all established structures, ignoring the fact that they too were born of idealism that must be allowed to illumine again, unhindered by the shady shadows of the dense, dastardly woods that have grown unchecked around the ideals.
In short, Mr. Kejriwal doesn't have to proscribe slow-chugging wheels and go on a quest to invent a means that will ease the transportation of the Nation, heavy with hopes and ambitions and ideals, into a bright future. He only needs to get the wheels to perform at their best, diving into the biography of what is extant to discover how they can be revitalized. To seek to invent better lubricants and ball-bearings, though, would not be amiss. But, such inventions wouldn't satisfy the hunger of a mad scientist obsessed with an accomplishment that will transform the world to a place that bears no resemblance to its past, would it?
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