Of Toilets and Streetlights

Add a million streetlights and you would have a thousand crime less a day. Make that pot bellied best constable actually do a beat and fire the SP who does not go out on night patrol, you will have another ten thousand or so of crime a day knocked off. Build a million toilets and another five hundred rapes of women answering natures call out there in the open will end. Install high end cameras across highways and arm the toll booths and most criminals will have no place to run.

Allow court sittings to be held on Skype and working days of his and her lords and ladyship should be just the same as any other government servants, publish quarterly report card of all advocates in ever bar... How many cases closed, how many won, how many lost and what is the average time taken for closure and then we will have no backlogs. Make railway stations work like airports and half of hawala deals will vanish.

Is all this possible in India? Yes, but a millennia later. Its not possible today because too many interconnected dots that make modern societies what they are is missing. If you do not have schools only coaching institutes, if you don't have teachers but a million lowly paid workers who landed the job because it was the only job they could get, if the most important interfaces of civil society, its police, its lawyer, its doctor, its health worker, its engineer and its priest does not inspire confidence and is looked down with contempt, we will have the kind of society that is India of today. Lawless, headless, clueless.

Add to that, you have a tame president who promptly signs any legislation that nullifies Supreme Court driven directives. A politician should not contest from jail says the court, not necessarily says the legislature. There was a time when we used to believe in a Messiah. We thought someone will come and stop this country from exploding from within. Today, not one citizen has such a stupid hope. Soon, this sheer anarchy will result in blatant lawlessness, the kind that made lord Krishna doom the yaduvamsam forever. When there is no politician doctor lawyer policeman or teacher to spit on, we will spit on each other.

Or someone can begin by lighting up the fu$*ing streets, one city at at time.