Television companies, corruption and a matter of will...

Unbelievable as it might sound, apart from mentioning it to my mother once or twice, my father didn't say anything about where the will was kept or what it contained. It's one of the most important family documents and yet no one in our family knew its whereabouts.

So a year or so after his sudden death (and being the eldest), I was assigned the monumental task of trying to locate it. My family assured me it'd be easy peasy.

As I sat on the plane for a 9-hour flight to Amritsar, part of me thought I had a better chance of locating the Holy Gail or the lost city of Atlantis.

I mean, the only clue I had was that it was somewhere in the Punjab - and that's hundreds of square miles!

And India is a different world. 'Easy- peasy'? I don't think so...

Apart from the density of bureaucracy and red tape you have to cut your way through, what made it particularly difficult was the layers of bribery you witness when you're dealing with officials whether they're government or otherwise.

I might be wrong - so forgive me if I sound a little disingenuous - but when it comes
to corruption it must be difficult to beat India. And it's partly because bureaucracy and corruption - whether it's systemic, corporate or social - is part and parcel of Indian way of life. It's all about business - dictated by the laws of supply and demand - and no aspect of Indian life is sacred. Even marriage is traditionally based on economic factors and not love.

In India you can do anything if you've got the money - jump queues, make appointments with officials at a time convenient for you (even out of office hours), bribe police officers, traffic police, airport officials, sales people, doctors, priests - the lot!

It seems that no one is immune to the allure of the Indian rupee or the pound sterling.

In the process I had to pay a range of obliging civil servants, officials et al for getting them to do what was actually their job. And by doing so - expensive as it was - I managed to locate the will within five days!

So you might be forgiven for thinking that problems like these are uniqely Indian characteristics. Not so if you look at our own parliamentary cash for questions affair a few years ago; postal vote tampering/vote rigging; councillors fraudulently claiming thousands of pounds worth of disability grants for home improvements; celebrities like jockey Lester Piggott not paying the income tax they owed; the former Lord Chancellor decorating his office with wall paper that cost thousands of pounds a roll; issues around Labour party donations; the news that television companies have been rigging programme competitions and, that a media award for Ant and Dec was fixed.

This weekend we also learn that a number of phone-in programmes and charity events like Children in Need and Comic Relief may have been behaving duplicitously and essentially conning viewers through premium calls. For instance, there has been a revelation that BBC has been holding back £106,000 charity money. And only last Thursday ITV was fined £5.7m for repeatedly cheating viewers who entered premium phone call competitions.

And this is probably just the tip of the iceberg - heaven knows what's going on underneath the surface reality.

It seems that no matter how many checks we put into place to ensure that people don't take advantage of the system, somehow, someone is bound to find some kind of a loop-hole through which they'll penetrate the 'secure' enclosures. And the more power they have, the more likely it is that they'll use the system to their advantage because power corrupts.

It's no wonder more and more of us our distrustful of the establishment - the great and the good in our society - and the workings of our democracy. When corruption starts to extend to our national/public organisations, then there is a serious problem.

Even Spain has been at it - robbing Cliff Richard, of a victory in the 1968 Eurovision Song Contest.

So anyway, on the plane back from India, I couldn't help thinking. Perhaps what Indiana Jones should have done - if he had been really astute - is just paid people. That way he wouldn't have had such a palaver and no one would have got shot. Not very exciting as an adventure, I admit, but hey he could have had the Holy Gail delivered to him on a plate.

Because, sadly, corruption really is the by-word at moment - like easy-peasy.