This is the Guardian.

I was drawn to the piece when I started reading news reports of this investigation into

allegedly widespread rigging in a major government examination, which isn't always news in India,

but what was new was the fact that lots of people who were suspects in the scandal were

mysteriously dying. And on the one hand, some people said this was a clear conspiracy. The

government insisted it was a series of coincidences that had been stitched together,

and that's what really drew me into the piece. The questions of death and the questions of

this kind of conspiracy remain very unique. I think the underlying factors that the piece

explores around the dynamics of public school or other public service examinations in India remains

very relevant. If anything, India's economic crisis has only exacerbated many of the factors

that led us to the situation that is explored in the piece. One way to enter this piece is to

consider the fact that India has no functional labor laws, that Indians work longer hours than

workers in almost any other country in the world except for maybe China and some countries in

Southeast Asia. And the fact that wage inequality in India is intense and extreme. So the only

job that actually provides a modicum of security, reasonably good wages and reasonably good work hours

is a job in a government service. And obviously with the retreat of the state, government jobs in

India as elsewhere in the world are becoming fewer and fewer. What this means is the government now

has these intensely competitive examinations. And the story looks at one particular organization

in a state in central India, which is in charge of administering these examinations. And it

explores how corruption in this organization had over a period of time wide ranging and well

fatal effects on a group of or rather a cohort of young people just desperate to secure their

future. What I like you to take away from this pieces to consider a question that I think all of us

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