Let us not go into the details of who is who in the drama, but we may be heading for a similar climax. It means exactly what it means. We are taking on corruption, but we don't know the real enemy. The bottom line is that we are fighting the fight for the sake of fighting. We don't know if it is against the giants. We don't know if it is against the windmills.

The concern has its basis. A man was arrested on the charge of managing fund for a top dog and then he was held in custody. But lately he has been released because he is said to have agreed to help the government recover the stolen money. Bet your life, your servant was not going to get so lucky. He would have gone to jail for being an accomplice to much smaller theft.

Then there is the story of a man who is asking for interest exemption and his case has been recommended to the central bank for favorable consideration. This man is a chronic defaulter of bank loans and once falsely claimed oil in containers filled with water.

We are talking about a respectable man, who holds a high office in one of the apex bodies for businessmen. He does not refund bank loans, asks for interest exemption, and gets not even a scratch for any of his misdeeds. If life is so good, what is wrong with corruption?

So, here giants morph into windmills as Don Quixote marches on, because it is not clear what standards are being applied in the fight against corruption. When you keep some and leave some, it doesn't tell where you stand on the whole thing. Right now it looks like we are fighting at random. Nobody is paying any attention to it.

No, I am not talking about sinners. They are already getting lot of attention. Every day we are bringing fresh charges against fresh names. More people are going to jail. But the success of the drive against corruption will not depend on how many people are going to be held. Rather it may depend on the number of people who are going to be held back.

This will be difficult unless we also pay more attention to sins. The man couldn't have been released or the loan defaulter would have been nabbed, had we not gone by the sinner but by the sin.

A former minister was allowed to go abroad, while others were embargoed to leave the country. Perhaps, there is a basic flaw in our understanding of corruption. It may take a thorn to pick a thorn, but corruption can't be removed by corruption. Common sense, a room can't be airtight if there must be a crack in the window.

May be this government is coming to see the wisdom that was spelled out years ago by US baseball legend Yogi Berra. He said, "In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But in practice, there is."

There is no doubt that those who came to power on January 11 had a theory. They wanted a change for the better, a clean up drive by thrashing out all the dirt which had gathered in our national life. They wanted a spring cleaning, a new start for this country.

But somehow their hands fumbled and feet faltered like the army of Spartacus who lost courage at the gate of Rome when they saw the statues of the Roman gods. We don't know what has happened in our case. It is possible that the government has realized it is indeed difficult to practice the difference between theory and practice.

They wanted to keep the two political leaders out of the country. They tried to prevent one of them from returning home and send away another. The rest is history. There is one building still standing tall at the heart of the city, thumbing its nose at all of us.

Hard to explain why. It could be foreign pressure. It could be bad planning. May be they have been betrayed. May be there has been a rift amongst them. May be they know now what they didn't know before. Prophets came, messiahs came and then the reformers came. But the percussive march of virtue since the dawn of Mankind has not been able to eliminate vices. So why blame anybody else?

But blame or not, it now appears as if the government has slowed down. And if it goes like this, it might come to a grinding halt, getting reformed by the same forces, which it set out to reform. In that sense, corruption is a treacherous thing. If it can't fight the enemy, it often joins them.

The very basic lesson for those who don't know it is that given an inch, corruption takes a whole yard. It works like a hole in the shirt, which gets bigger and bigger, given indulgence to a twiddling finger. And it happens from indulgence to indulgence, condoning to condoning until the wrongs look right and mind is overtaken by delusion. Don Quixote may have been right in the ultimate analysis. Corruption makes the giants disappear and what is left to see are the windmills.

Emerson writes about the inscriptions on the gates of Busyrane: "Be bold!" was written on the first gate; "Be bold, be bold, and evermore be bold," read the second gate; and "Be not too bold!" the third gate. It seems that what started with a bang is getting ready to end with a whimper. Who wants to be bold before we cross the third gate?

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.