My first personal encounter with bribery and corruption occurred when I was sent off as a callow 18-year-old to get some paperwork done in the boondocks of Bankura, where we possessed ancestral property. The family factotum in Bankura had done the groundwork but somebody had to sign things.The factotum and I spent a day wandering around the district court, land revenue and municipal offices, meeting faceless gnomes called "Ajit babu" and "Barun babu", drinking many cups of tea with thin arrowroot biscuits and submitting papers as and where directed. There was the usual mass of signed attestations and affidavits and "plain-paper applications to the concerned authority".At the end of the day, I diligently totted up the damages before boarding the train back to Howrah. The actual quantum of cash spent was to the order of Rs 250, inclusive of the return ticket. But expenses had incurred in tiny increments of five rupees. So, the devil was really in the detail.When I submitted the accounts to my father, he glanced at it, laughed and said "Ok! You've only paid about Rs 50 as bribe. Not bad at all!" I asked him how he figured this out and he told me this simple rule of thumb: Anything paid against a receipt is not a bribe. It may be a professional fee, it could be an unnecessary charge, but it is not a bribe.It is a rule that Indians learn early. If you're offered a receipt, the expense is kosher. When the accounting gets really complicated, as for instance, when a business is dealing with customs, central excise, sales tax and octroi, that's the one certainty. If it's receipted, it's not a bribe. This principle is common to most Eastern bureaucracies.There is another little rule of thumb that works across most cultures East of the Suez. The "Ajit babus" and "Barun das" and their equivalents in assorted bureaucracies are always more reasonable and more helpful when they "know" who they are dealing with. A young man from a "good family", however "good family" may be variously defined in Beirut, Lahore, Delhi, Dhaka, Hong Kong or Tokyo, for that matter, will always find it easier to wheel and deal in the corridors of power. The principle remains the same across most Oriental cultures. When various companies around the globe got their noses into the Iraqi food-for-oil trough, they had to keep these two operating principles in mind. They were dealing across borders with a bunch of loonies running a regime on the lines of a personal fiefdom. The loonies were demanding money to expedite very lucrative deals. This money was to be paid on obscure heads to various opaque entities. But the chaps receiving the cash were perfectly happy to accept cheques and to offer stamped and sealed receipts for the payments. What's more, the intervention of known persons of "good family" cleared access to the very top of the ant-heap and obviated the need to deal with many layers of the Baghdadi equivalent of "Ajit babu".It is a situation that businessmen hailing from Eastern parts instinctively understand. The ones who could trot out helpful uncles did so. It expedited the process. The ones who could not produce influential uncles worked their way up the feeding chain. I am sure people knew or at least suspected that the payments would end up being misappropriated. But they had their receipts and they had their business deals. Unfortunately, the Volcker Committee was chaired by an American and business mores there are different. It's apparently ok to invade a country and then award logistics contracts without tender to a company that used to be run by a very senior member of the invasion committee. It's also ok for the company in question to charge 400 per cent mark-up as risk premium in a war zone. But it is not ok to make receipted payments to departments of an ousted administration. Go figure whether you'd rather do business a la Washington or a la Bankura!
