In spite of his discourses, as the waywardness of his sons grew out of bounds, his hard feelings for the wealthy reached obsessive proportions. What was worse, he came to equate riches with corrupt practices. And he came to believe that the rotten campus culture was the outcome of a conspiracy by the corrupt to stall the progress of the upright. He theorized that the corrupt, by waylaying the children of the poor at school, contrived to nip in the bud the challenge of the have-nots. It was thus, he concluded, they came to have hegemony over money for successive generations. Thus, he came to see the corrupt as the scourge of the society for they devour at its very vitals. Why, he even declared that they usurp the fruits of development without any contribution to the growth of the economy. He was particularly unpardonable of them for they caused the high cost of economy that made it worse for the common man. The most condemnable aspect was that they occasioned the moral degradation in society with their corrupting influence.
As his belief grew in what he surmised, so was his penchant to equate the rich with the corrupt and castigate them alike. He soon became a crusader against corruption and advocated the boycott of the corrupt to make easy money an unattractive proposition. The below par scores his boys managed at the exams seemed to underscore the veracity of the theories he propounded making him paranoid. In his perversity, he even came to welcome their failure as it vindicated his own stated position. At the same time, the progress Vidya made both at the fine arts and the sciences revived his visions of the revival of his family to rival its past glories.
His moment of glory came when, in her final year, Vidya went public with her dancing skills on college annual day. In the accolades she received, he envisaged the crowning glory of his surname. Midway during the program, impressed with her beauty and grace, the chief guest approached him for Vidya’s hand to his engineer son. Seizing the chance, he ascended the stage and announced that his daughter’s hand was sought just then by a highly placed official for his well qualified son. After a dramatic pause, he declared famously, that he was rejecting the proposal as the father was a known grafter. To the dismay of the unfortunate man, he said that the honest public should deem that the campaign to boycott the corrupt had begun.
The echo in the gallery that followed seemed to have led him to the crescendo of his crusade. But, back home, the reactions varied. While his wife thought he was foolhardy, Vidya felt he had the guts to live up to his principles. Mohan and Raghav, who had held by then that their father was cranky, were not surprised by his bravado. And as the incident was widely reported in the press, he thought he had become a celebrity after all.