Ramdev and Corruption - Where the twain meet

The civil society's support for Mr. Ramdev's adventurism disguised as fast against corruption has me worried. Don't get me wrong. I am as much against corruption as you are. But if you are against the corrupt and want to take the legislative way to deal with it (since we are in a democracy), I suggest you get into the hurly burly of politics and do so. Being out of it and taking a lone ranger's path to supposed activism against corruption is to see corruption from a very narrow viewpoint.

Corruption has many hues, and comes disguised in all kinds of shapes and sizes. To glibly put the onus of corruption on the black money stashed away in foreign banks by its owners is to trivialise the issue beyond redemption. The stashed away loot is only a visible manifestation of the malaise that grips our psyche. Don't we pay off the MCD when they come to check our water cooler on whether it contains the aedes egypti mosquito larva? How many times have we asked the Chemist not to print out a legitimate receipt for the medicine that we have bought because it entails adding another 12.5% to the total cost? The neighbourhood doctor never gives us a receipt for the consultation that s/he charges. Do we crib? That isn't corruption, right? The examples are just too many and the vista of their operation ridiculously large. We just need to watch our everyday life from a slightly more objective angle.

We are only corrupting our own body politic to the mire when we classify corruption as something that belongs to the political class. And the Ramdevs of this country would rather piggyback on that thought and earn even more adulation from an idiotic public!