How honest are we?

Back in India, we keep crying “politicians are looting our country”, “we need selfless and honest leaders”, “Our country would be great if had good leaders” and so on. While all of the above are true, I wonder to what extent the common man is honest. You don’t get my thinking, here is the list I compiled.

• The property we buy in India gets registered to half the value and the other half is paid for in cash. This is so rampant that one will be hard pressed to find a seller willing to quote the actual sale price of the property and pay tax for the same. 
• We never believed in paying for the software we use, we believe in hacking an OS and pirating the same than paying the full price.
• We love our pirated DVDs of movies, practice is so organized that one can find an illegal camera print copy of a movie within a day of its release.
• I don’t remember the last time I paid full price for a musical CD
• We negotiate with the food caterer to see if he can give us a discount for paying in cash. Of course he does, deduct the sales tax from the order and offer it as a discount.
• We believe in registering properties and opening accounts in our non working spouses to save on taxes.
• We rarely believe in reporting rental income on our taxes.
• We believe in opening multiple accounts in multiple banks to avoid tax mans interest.   
• We blame the government official of not working but how many hours in an actual 8 hour working day we spend in doing “work”?          

The list can go on, I will be first to admit that I am guilty of quite a few items in the list.

The motivation for this blog post came from this Kannada song.