Thank you so much for the thrill of seeing the Elizabethan writer, Francis Bacon, quoted - my A level English Literature syllabus of 1956! But how alien his concept of 'service' feels in this culture! It became the tradition of at least one stream of the English culture and sometimes I think this once mighty stream has become a mere trickle even in the UK. Every time I go home it is more and more like Bangladesh, You see, no one is actually teaching it! It was one of the old values that was taken for granted by a generation that sneered at all that purveyed those values, particularly good religious education....

Observing the way some of the Bangladesh middle and upper class handle positions of status is very strange for me, brought up in the stream of this tradition of service and so being well drilled in the dictum "From those to whom much is given, much will be expected!" That is always a powerful disincentive to becoming a spoilt brat! The assumption here seems to be that the higher one goes in status, the less work one does - in practice, the manager of a bank comes into work later than those lower down the scale! Yet what an influence it is on any place of work when the boss is there with the early birds! Too often here, if something turns up that needs a great deal of effort and skill (and should therefore, one would think, be done by the Person at The Top) then that, being difficult, is given to some underling, who groans and, of course, does it reluctantly - and badly. What an impact it has when it is the Top Wop who actually carries out the key assignments! And what about the mastery of the paperwork? I heard, some time ago, the story of a government minister, who had to ring from his office on one occasion for a man to bring him pen and paper!

Some of the attitudes to wealth are also very damaging. Many assume that the enviable state of having a high salary means having a lot of time on your hands! Unfortunately, one of the side-effects of this is the deep resentment of the high salaries that some foreigners earn here. Hingsha - jealousy! But many of them work at a pace and intensity that some Bangladeshis simply could not imagine! I think of one of my friends, heading up a major project, who is nearly as old as I am and his car comes for him at 7.00 o'clock six days a week! It is very sad if Bangladeshis only see the foreigners here as motivated by personal greed. In my 7 years of experience here, I have been very impressed how many I have met who are here to serve! Our motivation is to do something, to achieve something. What for? For Bangladesh!

So you are right. To start an article on the impact of corruption by quotations about service is spot on. Corruption is evidence of a gap where the heart should be - and not merely a malfunction.