The Civil Servants thought of themselves as Guardians, in the Platonic sense : “ All who are in any place of command in so far as they are indeed rulers, neither consider nor enjoin their own interest but that of the subjects on behalf of whom they exercise their craft….” (Republic)

Philip Woodruff : The Guardians

Like the summer heat of India, bribery is something which most of us have come to accept as part of being Indian. And just as in the case of the weather, many of us talk at length but do nothing about it because we think that it is a doomed fight anyway. We haven’t even given it a try. And what is worse, for every one person making that extra effort, there are hundreds actively discouraging from the sidelines. Every one of us should shun the company of such cynics with as much dread and aversion as we would a plague. Show me a single cynical achiever!