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Why Abdul Karim Telgi is man of the year

Why Abdul Karim Telgi is man of the year - Sify.com

I really loath putting this post in India Rising category, but what I concluded is that, well India is rising and getting there where we are ready to dig the criminals out and move forward.

Take the sheer audacity of Abdul Karim Telgi, for example. A small time stamp paper vendor, he was no mover and shaker aiming for a big industrial license. He did not represent international arms companies salivating at the thought of a defence order. But he allegedly spotted an opportunity in something that most Indians are not even conscious of - how many of us come across stamp papers in our lifetimes, and if we do, how much thought do we give it? For most of us, it is a legal formality at best and an inconvenience at worst because they are usually in short supply.

Yet, for Telgi, it represented a gold mine which netted him, and countless others at various strata of the administrative steel frame, crores of rupees-and would have continued to do so had someone not spotted that the papers they had drawn up documents on were fake.

On a much smaller scale but in some ways far more potent was the leaking of the Common Admission Test (CAT) examination paper of the prestigious Indian Institutes of Management. The IIMs, like the IITs, are the jewels of the Indian educational system, having consistently maintained their high-standards for decades. IIM graduates are prized by corporates here and abroad.

What both these scams have done is to strike at the very integrity of respectable processes. We want to be sure that an IIM graduate is the best of the best, reaching that pinnacle of academic success by merit and hard work, not by cheating. A stamp paper is not merely a legal document; it represents trust in the system. Shattering that trust is a slippery slope. How long before people start wondering if their currency notes are genuine?

Which is why this corruption deserves to be high-lighted and its implications more thoroughly discussed. Abdul Karim Telgi has shown that the 'feel-good' story is not without its warts and for that he deserves to be named 'man of the year.'