How does a highflying Western urban professional get money to go to the Ocean Club in the Bahamas on weekends by chartering a plane and how do the regimes of power assist such cultures to flourish by befooling ordinary Americans? How is it consequential to a severe shock to world economy if the United State runs out of its coffer?
How do you go to Peter Nygard’s Nygard Cay Beach Resort which is a private cay in New Providence, Bahamas? This ultra-resort costs around $30,000 to $40, 000 per day. And you can go there if you have staggering amount of cash by your business efforts or by the money your gang has accumulated with artificial hike in the weird world of real-estate. This second group of men and women are the ones who have familiarized us with the US debt ceiling, and Obama-Republican contestation.
The greed engulfed some men and women in this part of the world too. The Indian economic boom tempted many international and national players to fish billions out of the little fates of millions of ordinary Indians. What they do is almost similar to what happened in the US. They make a group of people who artificially increase the share prices in the market and ordinary Indians find it lucrative to buy the shares. When the hope gears them to readiness for richness, the noose is tightened and the players of the great game disappear to Project Genesis cruise ship.
I gave you two examples but the problem does not end here. Corruption is not the problem for a man like Anna Hazare. The problem is the institutionalization of corruption in the governmental quarters: It is the legalization of corruption. Those who hike the share prices and that of the real-estate are not doing anything illegal.
This is a simple act of you selling a two-story flat of 1600 square feet in 5 million Nepali rupees. You fix your brother to buy it in 10 million. The price hike is based on no foundational practical value. You are the neighbor and you come to know about it.
You buy it paying 11 million rupees, a third person buys it paying 13, and you impractically sense its market value and buy it back in 15. What will happen when the gang which indirectly incited you to buy disappears from the trading scene? A 15 million-house which you have bought by selling everything which you possessed from your years of hard work! You have nothing to do now apart from opening up a grocery shop where 5 people come to buy cigarettes and two packets of noodles in the morning, and for the rest of the time you doze while local mosquitoes bite you to keep you awake.
I am awestruck by the uses of the terms like legal and illegal, justice and injustice in our logical discourse. Legal and illegal are the same terms of cultural implications, and so are the terms like justice and injustice.
Your neighbor does not have the money to go to Emirates Palace in Abu Dhabi, but he certainly has a luxury trip to an ordinary 5-star hotel in Bangkok. He has done nothing illegal but bought and sold and you happened to arrive into the scene by your rational business proposition. Here comes a man like Anna Hazare who pounces on such legalized institutional economic culture.
I am awestruck by the uses of the terms like legal and illegal, justice and injustice in our logical discourse. I told Jahanavi-appa that these binaries do not have conceptual differences. Legal and illegal are the same terms of cultural implications, and so are the terms like justice and injustice. She is extremely intelligent; I have been writing to you about her. She said she knows where from I get to deconstruct such binaries.
Glaucon says in Plato’s The Republic, “To my mind, the nature of justice and injustice have not yet been made clear.” Then follows a brilliant discourse which deconstructs the entire idea of good and evil as separate conceptual polarities. Glaucon tries to know what they are in themselves, and then sees a striking similarity. For him, law and just is the result of mutual covenants who do not want to experience either justice or injustice. Those who are interested in law and logic may read this brilliant proposition.
Anna Hazare does care about the absurdity of legal and illegal if not in Glauconian logical terms, but he has seen what practical philosophers could see whether it was Chanakya or Socrates.
orungupto@gmail.com
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