I don’t remember if I heard it from a friend or read it in a study. Memory being inversely proportional to age. Anyway, the point being how so many children in the west thought milk came from cartons. No concept of a cow.
Similarly, if you ask these days, most will say that black money comes from swiss accounts or mattresses or benami properties. The same confusion, you see. Where it is is not where it came from. Black money is generated relentlessly by a huge machinery at work – a constant byproduct. In common parlance, we call it the system. The system gives a few undue powers and it is these who accumulate maximum black money.
Be it a judge and a bureaucrat or the peon at RTO, we all know they are the most corrupt. In non-governmental system, there is corruption as well as tax evasion. Both very systemic. Both untouched by demonetization. The new currency has hardly reached us and there are politicos in Gujarat bribing with it in lakhs. That’s the system at work. And, it never stopped working.
Fixing that is a more critical issue. That will involve hurting not the man on the street but the ones who are not inconvenienced by demonetization. For them, it is only a lull,and in a few weeks, business as usual. And, that no govt will ever touch. For all bravado and machismo, I doubt if the current prime minister has the guts to dismantle the system.
