SATIRE
A Micro-primer on Corruption
If you are caught in the act, just deny it.
T
his is EPW in an introspective mood at the end of the
year. Just look at us. From issue to issue, we plod our
lumbering way from kernel density functions to the laby-
rinthine by-lanes of postmodern prose, from stern Notes and
Commentaries to sterner Perspectives and Editorials, from the
dry tabulation of data to their even drier interpretation. When
we are not wagging our finger at the world, we are boring the
world’s pants off with our laboured turgidities. Where is the
family in any of this, where the tiniest space for caring and
sharing, where the possibility of offering to parents something
with which they can inspire and ennoble their offspring? Occa-
sionally, at least, should this weekly not make an effort to reach
out with hope and promise to the needs of the next generation,
with positive and encouraging little tracts for the times that
reflect the manners and morals and mores of the contemporary
world? The thought emboldens us to try our hand at writing a
helpful little primer on one of the most pressing requirements of
success and achievement in the modern world—corruption.
Parents who read aloud pieces such as the present one every
night at bedtime to their moppets might expect the latter to dis-
play a marked improvement in their attitudes and conduct, to
take rapid strides towards achieving an irredeemably hard-
boiled unprincipledness.
One could begin by instructing children on the virtues of
corruption by quoting to them from Joseph Heller’s Catch-22:
“From now on I’m thinking only of me.” Major Danby replied
indulgently with a superior smile: “But, Yossarian, suppose
everyone felt that way?” “Then,” said Yossarian, “I’d certainly
be a damned fool to feel any other way, wouldn’t I?” It might
be added for the benefit of the children (if they haven’t already
cottoned on to it, the devious little things), that Yossarian would
be an even bigger damned fool to feel any other way if nobody
Economic & Political Weekly EPW decEMBER 26, 2015 vol l no 52
was thinking only about themselves. To feel as Yossarian does
constitutes what the infants will recognise, after they have
become trained economists, as a dominant strategy equilibrium.
Not that they should be required to draw pay-off matrices
every time they do something self-seeking and anti-social:
these things should become second nature, and come instinc-
tively to them, just as it will come instinctively to them to steer
their BMWs against the traffic lights without their having to
solve a set of complicated differential equations in order to
understand the dynamics of their vehicles’ motion (much less
the morals of their behaviour, guided as it is by inter-temporal
utility-maximisation).
It only remains to instruct the toddlers on what they
should do when they are caught in the act and invited to de-
fend themselves on a television panel show of the variety that
is now a staple feature of every Indian intellectual’s evening
from 9 pm onwards. Here are the easy steps they must be invited
to adopt. First deny the facts. When that becomes untenable,
claim ignorance of the facts and assert their unknowability.
When that becomes untenable, play for time. When that becomes
untenable, indicate loss of video, and then audio, contact.
When that becomes untenable, keep asking what’s so wrong
about the alleged misdeeds. When that becomes untenable,
talk about the distinction between legality and morality, while
carefully dealing with neither. When that becomes untenable,
change the subject. When that becomes untenable, blame
the critic. When that becomes untenable, smirk, shout, and
become abusive in a gradually orchestrated progression. It is
bound to work. As that great philosopher P G Wodehouse, who
deserves a place on every bookshelf next to Spinoza’s Ethics,
always maintained: “Stout denial is the thing. Stick to stout
denial. You can’t beat it.”
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