We bribed a cop today.
Wait a minute, just let that sink in a bit.
We…bribed…a…cop...today.
As a former Federal Officer I’m horrified. As a tourist in India it’s a charming peek into a different culture.
I won’t say who or where in order to protect the guilty, but here’s how it went down.
In India the cops just sit by the side of the road with a couple of small portable metal fences on wheels to kind of denote a traffic stop. They don’t pull everyone over however, only when they notice something wrong would they pull someone over.
Our infraction was that there was a problem with our license plate. It was a brand new car with a temporary plastic front plate. Someone had tried to steal the plate and instead had broken off the first two letters of it. These letters are merely the State designation, think of it as if all California plates started with CA.
We had realized this was a problem, but there was really nothing we could do about it, it was a temporary plate. We’d have metal permanent plates in a few days anyway. It wasn’t like they could issue us a temporary temporary plate. In the mean time we’d fashioned a temporary solution, a large paper sign in the front of the plate with the missing two first letters. This is India after all, you improvise.
So seeing the menace to society we were, as we rounded a corner the cop motions us to pull over. Now I don’t know what happens if you run from cops in India, but it seemed that it would take them an awfully long time to get in their car and chase you. They kind of reminded me of the old fat county cops we had in Maryland who were too lazy to get out of their car, if you run away on foot, they’d just give up the chase. Not that I had experience with that or anything.
Our cop, I’m told, was very nice about our situation, normally they can be absolute dicks, but there is the possibility that a Westerner sitting in the front seat may have had something to do with their demeanor. He asked for a license, which it turned out we did not have on us, and the registration which was just a temporary.
This left the cop in a quandary. In the U.S. the cop would normally issue a fix-it ticket for the license plate, a ticket for the missing driver’s license, and make somebody else drive you home. But this is India, there’s no really good way of tracking things. The cop has only a few things he can do, he can seize your driver’s license, which we didn’t have, seize your registration, which is temporary anyway we’ll get a permanent one in a few days, or seize the car, which is a whole lot of hassle. And God knows Indian cops don’t want a whole lot of hassle, they want to do the hassling, not be a participant.
So the cop asked the driver what he thought the solution might be. The driver answered that perhaps a ‘spot fine’ would do. Spot fines used to be common in India, you’d pay the cop your fine and go on about your business. But as you can imagine this left a lot of room for bribery, the world’s second oldest profession. Thus they did away with spot fines. But tradition is hard to give up.
I’ve never been able to bribe anybody. It’s a grave weakness of mine. I have a hard time tipping the valet, it seems like I’m paying him not to harm my car. I only tipped a maitre d’ once in my life in Las Vegas to get a better seat, and I still feel slimy for doing it. I understand that concierge’s get big tips, I’d love to use one sometime, but I wouldn’t know how much to tip them, therefore I just do everything myself.
My friend told me about going to the Indian Consulate in San Francisco to pick up a visa but she arrived five minutes after closing. Sorry.
Oh wait, she slipped the guard five dollars and was let in. Five dollars? Five dollars?! That’s it? The guy risked his livelihood, his future, possibly even jail time, for five dollars? This is a Consulate guard? If she could bribe him for $5, what will he be willing to do for $100? That’s why bribery is so heinous.
Graft and bribery, the scourge of the Earth. I’ve given a lot of thought lately as to what constitutes an ‘advanced’ country, and rule of law is at the top of my list. Yes, China has a booming economy, but the ones making a killing are the well connected and best at bribery. The rest of the country is subjected to their whims, destroyed thousand year old neighborhoods, destroyed food, destroyed water supplies, and destroyed air. Go live there for a few days and decide whether you really want your job back that was shipped over there if it means living like that.
Yes, we have our graft and corruption in the U.S., one need look no farther than Wall Street and Washington. But those guys really don’t like it at the local cop level and tend to enforce those laws a bit more stringently. If everybody in America started doing it, it wouldn’t be nearly as profitable for the guys on top.
One of the main reasons for ending Prohibition was graft. So many people wanted to drink alcohol that everybody was in on it, from cops, to politicians, to judges, the bootleggers were greasing so many palms the rule of law began to sag.
It’s also interesting that Prohibition is the only amendment added to the Constitution of the United States that restricted our rights, and look at what a flop that was. And now it seems all of the Amendments proposed from abortion, to government guided prayer in schools, to flag burning are all restrictive of rights. You never see any of our representatives proposing amendments demanding more rights to privacy from an intrusive government and corporations.
Oh, I’m sorry, I forgot, the Supreme Court did grant a new right, free speech for corporations, our new American citizens. According to Conservatives their philosophy is original intent, after 225 years we should divine the original intent of our Founding Fathers. The Roberts Court decided that this is was what the Founding Fathers fought and died for, the ability of massive corporations to give unlimited amounts of money to back politicians.
There’s only one problem with this ‘original intent’ philosophy, our Founding Fathers banned corporations. They were only allowed under strictly limited circumstances of time and scope. Why? Because they knew that corporations would become so large and powerful that they would threaten the freedom of Americans. And guess what, they were right.
The driver pointed out to the cop the predicament we were in, we’d done our best, fashioning a sign that clearly displayed the missing letters.
Ah yes, but the problem is the letters are too large. They were about a centimeter larger than the actual license plate letters.
It’s not like we had created the letters smaller than the license plate in order to try and hide ourselves from the hawk-like eyes of the police, they were bigger, and quite clear.
This sort of flouting of the sacrosanct laws of India would not stand. Who knows what manner of ill repute would spread if this infringement of the norms and mores of Indian society were allowed too stand. Chaos may ensue. Chaos!
Then again, who’s going to notice adding more chaos to the infinite chaos of India?
I wondered how close we had to be to the proper size of the lettering, for the cop to let us go? A half centimeter larger? A millimeter? A micron? Would the Lord Viceroy pull out his trusty caliper and measure this license plate to perfection to ensure the safety of all of those entrusted in his care?
In the mean time a family of five on a motorbike, the mother sitting side saddle, with her baby in her lap, passed us by. The police didn’t notice.
In the end the spot fine was…drum roll please….100 Rupes, two dollars.
Have a nice day Mr. petty, useless, pathetic, scum sucking, low life, plague on mankind, Policeman. Don’t spend it all in one place.
