Corruption, Summer Flowers and a Rainbow

 **25 May 2003**

Corruption breeds on the stakeful tables in government offices. And these are not the tables before the chairs of the high and mighty ones, those at the upper echelons of the official hierarchy.

Clerks and suchlike officials, who really pull the strings of the jobs, are the master breeders of red-tapism, favouritism, corruption and negligence.

They are, after all, the lawkeepers who have to ensure the transaction while sitting in their not-so-august chairs.

They are the mesh through which the fishfolk have to pass. They are the ones who sort out the portion of flesh to be doled out to the higher sharks.

It is to them that the credit goes for making the bureaucracy and functioning of public undertakings so sneaky, lethargic and bloodsucking.

Tucked away in the form of a paper in some file, lost in a stack of its poor brethren, there lies the slip of some loan granted, passport application or some grievance.

And the puny, real babu becomes the drawer of lots.

Beyond the miseries of such corruption, which stalls the mundane destiny of common folks, there are summer flowers and a summer rainbow on this 25th of May.

The wind rose suddenly, hotly, around six in the evening. It had all the initials of a dust storm, but it did not cross the limits of its windiness.

Sun-baked leaves of trees, acacia pods and neem seeds, unripe and green, breezed down.

The sky then got overcast with dusty clouds for a few moments. It even appeared favourable for a few drops of rain.

But it was not to be so.

After all, such drops are just a tiny metaphor against the baking summer of North Indian plains.

The wind, however, had some coolness in it, a sign that it rained somewhere.

Clouds were then beaten away by the dusty sandstorm of the wind.

The sun dazzled from the northwest, and lo and behold, we had a glimpse—or rather a summer version of it—of a part of the beauty, the rainbow.

Just a lower part of its incomplete rim in the southeast, starting from the dusty, grey, wispy mass and ending over that part of the horizon.

There the beauty smiled from across the hot, dusty veil.

Below, in my father's plot of potted plants, a cream-coloured rose, bearing all the brunts of wind and sunrays, has blossomed for the last two days.

A thing of beauty indeed.