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S Ravi- India's John Doe

I turned on the television after quite some time today evening. A heated debate was on all channels, with eloquent speakers shooting verbal arrows in all directions, as a shy and almost embarrassed of being there in the midst of those eloquent greater minds, sat Ravi Srinivasan. 

 The man has just returned after a jail visit, though without media  glare of the kind which accompanied Anna Hazare or say, Anis Trivedi, the cartoonist who got arrested very recently, in face of great national outrage. But that did not deter our kingly politicians from today arresting a man, a mango man, which Mr. Vadra looks down at with a very open disdain, notwithstanding the fact that he traces his origin to the same nameless human mass, which feels happy to be part of a nation bigger than individual  merely  by paying taxes.

 The remorselessness of corruption is in your face, and the disdain for law is complete. The brazenness of rulers start from where the selfish interests begins. Corruption of the ruling elite breeds on the individual greed to its citizens. Is it not so very common for people to not vote for the candidates who are clean primarily because such politicians do not offer the promise that they will help them jump the queues. They keep the system inefficient, for your need to jump the queues arise out off deficiencies of the system. Who would pay for telephone if providers are falling over one another to provide you with the same.

 It is this unfailing belief of the ruling mass in the corrigibility of the  large mass of people which allows them to act brazenly, to pressurise, humiliate any divergent thought or view which obstructs their tyranny. The poor, the lonely and the week is put on the screen of national sensibilities, as one is guillotined for speaking the truth. The person on the guillotine is incidental, a set up, merely used to send out the message to the larger populace. 
It would be unforgivable mistake of us to believe that this is an incident limited to S. Ravi. It is a proof, a symbol of the principle of liberty which we claim to live by, for which numerous people laid down their lives, before and after independence. We have failed in our previous moments of truth, will we continue to fail? Is that the kind of nation which we will leave behind to our children?
Truth has the tendency of sneaking from behind the most eloquent of the words. We need to be watchful of the moment when it peeks out from behind the bushes, like a scared kid, and open our arms with assurance that we will guard her with our lives. Truth is our little child, that we can ill afford to disappoint.

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