Today, when you hear of all the wrong that men and women in responsible positions have committed, and especially over the last five years, you know that the old uncertainties are back, that there are the homegrown demons we now need to send to perdition.

And where do you spot these demons? The answer ought to be easy for you to come by. When you are informed of the macabre manner in which murderers were permitted to fly out of the country by ministers happy to be given a slice of bad money as a price for silence and acquiescence, you remember the old tale of men being nasty, brutish and short.

That was Hobbes for you all those centuries ago. He lives, in this day and age, in a country you once thought was given to enthralling poetry and purposeful politics. Look around you. The poetry survives, just. The politics, having been commandeered by thieves and scoundrels, lies in a bad physical state.

We have said before, and we will say it again: when a minister finds little that is wrong in handing over a piece of prime public land, for a throwaway price, to his spouse who says it is for the human rights body she runs, morality and values take a bad plunge. When a man who discovers on a pale, fearsome morning that the gods have transformed him into a minister, and then proceeds to run his rivals out of town, you wonder at the sheer brazenness that politics has mutated into.

And as you wonder, you perhaps might try convincing yourself why the drive against corruption must go on -- relentlessly and pitilessly. But as you do, do not forget that corruption of the mind and body, and all other forms of it, is not merely the prerogative of the political classes.

Over the years, your bureaucracy has been taking this whole country for a ride, through its fidelity to whoever has held high political office and through its unabashed greed for wealth it has little right to own. How else do you explain the shame which comes encapsulated in the story of a mere assistant secretary to the government turning into the owner of a flat or two, of cars he changes every two years or so?

There are a good lot of these assistant secretaries or deputy secretaries around you, all squeezing the country into a deshaped mass that reminds you of a lemon that has nothing more to offer you. And then there are men in the nationalised banks who have systematically utilised their skills in the accumulation of wealth that goes way beyond their means of earning it.

When you watch some leading businessmen proffer words of wisdom to the country, on those ubiquitous, almost always inane talk shows on television, you miss a beat in your heart, for you know that those men have been pilfering things that belong to the country. And they have not been caught because those who might bring them under the net are themselves men playing criminality in a bigger league.

In short, you as a simple, hard-working, honest citizen must kowtow before all this criminality, until such time as the Lord of the Worlds has answered your prayer for justice. Call it poetic justice, call it the divine will, call it a mysterious working of fate.

The point is that when you watch these robber barons finally answer for their crimes, indeed confess everything that they have done to make life miserable for you and me, you know there is a God, that He has a way of doing things.

Today, it is God we recall every time we see the masks come off the faces of men who once thought they were gods themselves. These are men who today break down in court, shed tears, unable to take the shame being heaped on them. Time was when hundreds, perhaps thousands of men, wept copiously at the injustice these crying men inflicted on them, in what now seems to have been another day and age.

Collectively, as a nation, we felt the tears rise when bad men, all looking to profit from their own transport businesses went all the way, no holds barred, to run the state-run Bangladesh Road Transport Corporation out of town in the northern region of the country. Have you observed the irony?

In Parliament, they belong to parties that constantly plan on knifing one another to death. Outside it, they come together, to plunder and burn down all those resources that should be sustaining life for you and me, for our children. You ask: when will the Anti-Corruption Commission go after these men who have led a sustained campaign to destroy the BRTC?

That most wondrous tale of fifty two first class degrees issuing forth from the political science department of Dhaka University in a single academic year reminds you that the web of corruption has expanded far wider and gone far deeper than you could ever have imagined. Was there any inquiry? There most certainly was. Did the committee doing the job submit any report? It most assuredly did. So where is that report and how is it that we, the people, have been kept away from the revelations we think it may have come up with?

There are all the bad men and women who have undermined our politics. Likewise, there are all the bad academics who have scandalised our institutions of higher learning. If we can go after politicians, if we can ask for statements of wealth from them, we might as well go sweeping up that entire class of teachers who have developed their own brand of a free market in education, through cobbling those fifty two first classes into shape, through taking into classrooms young men and women who did not deserve to be there. Life cannot be fake, has never been fake. You live it or you don't. That being the premise, why must fake education be promoted by people who should have known better?

But -- and here lies the truth -- men of dubious intent do not know what values are all about. With few exceptions, there are the private universities whose sponsors and teachers are in immense need of education themselves. Education, being a priceless opportunity, cannot be measured in terms of things pecuniary.

You cannot fleece the young and their guardians, and then couch the fleecing through explanations that do not stand the test of logic. It is not education when you compel your pupil to forego her homemade lunch in favour of an exorbitantly priced sandwich or shingara at the university cafeteria.

Our forests have been disappearing into a web cast by sinister magic. The man you trust to save nature for you goes cheerfully into molesting it. The peasant you spot staring vacantly into nowhere is the star-crossed human being whose land has passed into the hands of thieves passing themselves off as real estate businessmen, as developers. There are always the wolves on their ceaseless prowl.

You never know how much more bizarre things can get in this land that speaks of all the legends you are heir to. But you know, too, that history has a way of settling scores, that good men and women do arise through the mist and the rain to cut a path for us through the dense woods of misery we pass through for years on end. There is always a new dawn for nations that understand the depths of pain.

Syed Badrul Ahsan is Editor, Current Affairs, The Daily Star.