A tv to remember

Few days back, around 1:00 night.
I had just come from office and was having dinner.
Parallelly channel surfing was on. All of a sudden i saw that one of the channel was showing that familier old screen of vertical stripes of various colours. An indicator that the channel is off the air.

I just could not believe it. I just stared at it for a couple of minutes in sheer amusement. In the age of 24x7 channels i never expected to see those stripes. Sure enough it was some regional Doordarshan.

Those stripes brought up so many childhood memories when TV used to be a prized posession.
Black and white tv's , tv's with wooden shutter doors and lock. Those knobs for changing channels and volume.
Days when number of channels used to be 12 or 16. Someone would proudly say that their tv has 20 channels. But in the end there were only 2 channels to watch.

Sometimes the picture would be disturbed and then someone would go and tweak a small knob at the backside of the tv. Or worst case scenario would be to go to the rooftop and rotate the antenna.

Another thing was related to colour tv's. With most of the tv's being black and white, a colour tv was an object of desire. And i remember one of my uncles putting up a coloured glass on black and white tv to make it a "colour tv"

Along with tv came all those fvourate programs that form an important part of my childhood memories.
But i think i will put up a separate post.

Rooting out corruption....beyond Anna Hajaare...

Anna Hajare's campaign for lokpal bill seem to have settled down a little. A few protests and lot of politics.
But is that all?
Will the lokpal will be able to curb all the corruption? I doubt.

It will be effective if at all against only one type of corruption where the official demands the bribe from unwilling citizen. But is that the only type of corruption that prevail in the country?
There is another scenario where corruption is mutual.
For example when a contractor pays bribe to an engineer to pass quality checks on his low quality work.
I believe that the common laws of demand and supply that govern other markets, govern this bribe market too.

Every coin has 2 sides.... they accept and demand more bribes because we pay them. But why we pay it?
Two - three major reasons.... we ourselves are doing something illegal or unethical...or we do not have patience for the normal course of system to complete.... or just to show our power and influence that we can bend the system.

This last point has become sort of fashion in society. Following rules has become a sign of lesser souls and since this has become a sort of social norm everybody tries to break the rule whenever possible.
We try to jump the signal , not to wear the helmet and then try to bribe the traffic police.
Many times we just want to short circuit the process. How many times we break the queue for bus or for railway ticket etc? Many times people just do it without feeling anything wrong about it.
As long as these things have social acceptance, we can never root out corruption.

I remember one add of tata tea which targeted corruption, it said, "woh khaate hain kyoki hum khilaate hain". How true!
No doubt sometimes we get trapped by these corrupt people who take advantage of we being in need and then we have no option but to heed. Like TC in long distance train or the cooking gas distribution agents etc.
But even there i feel it is our fault if we give in even without protesting or complaining to respective authorities.

Anna's campaign is just one side of the coin.
The way we behave and react forms the other side.