Matchboxes

I'll tell you an actual happening which has a bearing on the topic of today.
This was related to me by my father-in-law about 30 years ago.
He used to work in a steel mill by the name of NISCO, loacated in Belur, near Kolkata.

The factory had once gone under lockout. Nothing new for an Industry in Bengal. It would have been news if it had not gone under lockout.

The owner of the factory, I won't give names, called my father-in-law and two other officers.
Some payment had to be made to the workers and he wanted the payment to be made through them.
He asked point blank "which of you three is not a thief"
The others kept quiet but my faher-in-law said "Everybody in this world is a thief.We just wait for our opportunity.A bearer, if told to buy snacks worth Rs 10/- will buy snacks for Rs 9.50 and use 50 paisa to buy some biris".
"A manager will probably rob the owner of a few thousand rupees but you owners rob the government of crores of rupees. It is just who is given what opportunity"
The owner gave the job of distribution to my father-in-law, requesting him to keep the limit "bread and salt"(Atta/Namak).
I remember another great person expressing similar sentiments while talking of corruption and bribes.(I wish I could remember his name)
He said, "Everybody has his price. If somebody offered me $100.00 to do wrong, I would scorn him. If he offered me $10000.00, I would refuse him. If he offered me $1.0 million I would nod my in non acceptance. But if he offered me $10.00 million, I would have to think over it."
He further said, " I just pray to God that nobody offers me my limit."
My pictures today is of the innocuous match box.
I bought a pack of ten match boxes of AIM brand a product manufactured by WIMCO, a reputed company.
Unfortunately, the first box I opened had about 18 defective matches
That got me thinking and I opened all the balance 9 match boxes and the result is for all to see.The other boxes had 4,10,6,4,8,4,4,6,4, i.e an average of 6.8 matches.
This works out to 13.6% in a box of 50 matches.
Quite a saving, if I may be allowed to say so.
As my father-in-law said, the match box owners are robbing in the matches sold to the public. Of course, this is besides what they may be robbing the governement of Excise duty, sales and other taxes.
Of course AIM is not the only brand which robs. Earlier we used to buy "SHIP" brand. These too had similar defects and so we switched over to AIM with no improvement.

Sorry, nothing to cheer in this.
It makes me sad.

Radheshyam