Conscience

Recently I watched the movie” Judgement at Nuremberg” for the second time.( if you can arrange this movie I will recommend you to watch this movie). Some books and movies are so good that you read them or watch them once and after interval of few months or year when you read that book or watch that movie you get new insight. So what is so special about this movie? The movie is actually based on war crime trial of the National Socialist party (Nazi party) officials after the end of the Second World War. On the trial are the judges who held office during reign of Hitler. And of these judges one Judge is famous, learned and internationally known judge.  So in the debate between prosecutor (who is from United States of America) accuses “these learned persons (accused judges) knew better about the intentions of Hitler, they foresaw what was coming, still they supported the propaganda of Hitler.” Still the advocate who is defending the case of these judges put arguments in quite good way to defend the convicted judge still at the end of the movie these judges are held guilty and are convicted of the crime.

What this movie means for anyone like us? One thing which I learned from this movie was that whenever you are given some responsibility, or you hold some office and you are better far better than everyone else then it becomes your moral responsibility to do the work in the best possible way, however ignorant other people around you may be. Earlier when i use to hear the arguments of opposition party of asking the resignation of minister for any behavior i thought that these accusation were just part of blame game, but after watching the movie i realized the importance of such accusation, specially in leadership position This may not sound quite important for you but just think for a moment you reach at some quite high and respectable and responsible position of a leadership( which I assume a lot of people reading this blog will reach after 20 years) and people around you do not have as much caliber and talent as you have  then how you behave will set you apart. When I think like this I am often see quite contrast in history and present of India specially in the field of politics. If we look at the history of Indian freedom struggle movement most of our leaders were educated, rich and a huge population of our country was illiterate still none of our leaders tried to deceive our people and I believe this was the reason our democracy survived after independence. And at present when a large population of our country is literate, educated most of our leaders try to deceive people( as is happening in the case of Bihar polls at present, you can easily see the contrast if you read speech of any leader belonging to time of freedom struggle movement and you hear speech of our leader of our present time).

 There is a friend of mine who pointed this beautiful thing that we keep accusing leaders and friends of their corrupt behaviors but if we are given opportunities then we will also behave like them only. And the example he gave was that there are a lot of persons who are quite affluent still they own Below Poverty Line (BPL) card. And this exploitation mostly occurs with socially and economically downtrodden section of the society. The best example you can see is at railway station. If you will wait and see the ticket collector he will surely check ticket of people whose look like poor. And there are a lot of examples when people have option they try their best to be benefited the most. So say for example you go to a shopkeeper and he makes a wrong calculation and charges you less than what was your total bill, what will you do? And I believe your attitude and behavior of such small incidents only determine what you will do when you are given power.A lot of thing may sound like idealism to most of pragmatic man but i believe this attitude will determine which short of leadership our country will have, whether we will be corruption free or not.