The scene was nothing exceptional for the peak time mess on a Bangalore road -- vehicles milling around, with their noses and front wheels pointing in eight different directions, teasing the curious to guess which path they would eventually take; people trying to squeeze past layers of cars and bikes which have intentionally overshot the `stop' line by ten feet; frenetic yelling and screaming all around, the blaring cacophony accentuated by mad honking by the privileged ones in cars, who would rather not wait to allow pedestrians to cross. What nauseated even the most cynical was the sight of lines of two-wheelers revving up and pushing through dense crowds of people on the newly laid pedestrian foot-paths (yes!), making men, women and children do the unintended calypso, to dodge the unexpected assault.
My dear wife grimaced and said she hoped some idiots on bikes would be caught and thrashed, to prevent others from riding on the footpath. The traffic signal prolonged our stay a bit and lo and behold, my wife's fervent prayers were answered forthwith. There was commotion ahead of us, as some people came to fisticuffs in the readily gladiatorial atmosphere of our roads and we saw a couple of them got beaten up soundly. Only as we inched toward the intersection, we found out poor logic cruelly turned on its head -- that a biker rode roughshod into some pedestrians and in the following melee, punched a few in their faces as a bonus, for blocking his right of way! So, the aggressor and violator got more offensive and got away, leaving the aggrieved parties in tatters. Believe me, this is not an isolated instance; it repeats itself over and over again in every town and city with appalling regularity, in different contexts and at various levels, leaving most of us wondering where we are headed as a society, who is to blame and what the solution is.
People are perpetually looking to blame something or someone who is not present to retaliate and are always quick to point at that somnolent, ghostly institution called `government', for everything that is wrong with us. Because it is easy and also this establishment usually richly deserves all the condemnation it gets. But to an extent this seems blatantly unfair. Most of the incidents are triggered by people with little or no discipline, deliberately looking to flout rules with impunity, just to get ahead a few inches in life. They know fully well that they could wriggle out, even if caught, using some clout somewhere and the omnipresent holes in the process. They then use the tested template and repeat the offence at will and the impunity level just creeps up. Most of us would nod understandingly and agree with this hypothesis because it sounds reasonable, but still find it necessary to question what the government is doing. Because the actual guilty parties are faceless individuals, too many to count, spread out far too widely and therefore impossible to identify and confront! So, the immediate challenge is `what is the police doing'? The simple answer is police cannot be present everywhere, definitely not in all street corners. And until people get to be decent enough to self-regulate and control themselves to stay within some basic rules, incidents as described above would continue to happen, leaving the general populace in disarray. It does not take too much for the motorbike/scooter riders to stay off the pedestrian pathways, even if that means they are going to be delayed by a few minutes. The rest of us should stop blaming the government for everything and work towards making the small percentage of offenders realise the futility and iniquity of transgressing rules all the time for selfish reasons. The problem is we don't know how!
That leads me to the other part of the equation -- have we all become far too complacent and indifferent to the unruly behaviour and unlawful aggression bubbling around us all the time? Are we forgetting the fact that tomorrow we could be the victims and we should be acting in some way to protest? While the offenders have lost all civic sense and respect for others, have the rest of us forgotten to join hands and stand up when the need arises? The answer is in the affirmative. Lack of time may be a small factor but lack of mental fibre is possibly the more truthful answer. Who wants to get into a tangle with a rowdy on a bike? Let him use the footpath, so long as he does not hit me -- seems to be the general thinking. Hence the prevalent apathy. Most of us are guilty of such pathetic, spineless attitude which cause us to look askance in such situations. It is true that most of the offending dregs of the society are quick to draw a knife or other deadly weapon out to keep the public at bay as they make their breezy escape after the shenanigans. This does not inspire confidence in the people at the site to confront the culprits. Distressing reports of innocuous bystanders/well-wishers being stabbed or clubbed to death are all over the media and this is a big dampener for anyone to interfere and question the offenders. Who wants to get killed in the bargain, is a perfectly solid rejoinder.
Take the stinking example of garbage on Bangalore's roads. Time and again we have seen people riding bikes visiting a specific spot, carrying plastic bags full of garbage from home and swinging it into the dump as they ride past. The only qualification the spot has is that it already has a lot of such bags accumulated over a few hours. Education or literacy has nothing to do with this. We have seen owners of mobile carts selling food, carefully disposing off garbage into a bin properly while more affluent and educated people behaving atrociously as if the garbage is just an extension of their own selves. There is no use blaming the government, which is ineffectual any way, because it does make a feeble attempt to collect sorted garbage from homes. The fact that people come on bikes swinging the garbage in bags just tells us that they do not want to go through the little pain of sorting the stuff. It is obvious that the government cannot assign a goal keeper to each little garbage dump and this is not going to change until people change. Next time you see someone doing the honours, at least politely question him; yes, the risk is there that he is carrying a machete and might want to sharpen it on you!
Indian men happily whistling and urinating on the road-side may not be as ubiquitous as it used to be, but that spectacle still happens. Now, is it the government's fault that when the need arises for an individual, it has not been clairvoyant enough to position a urinal just there, ready for the person? Can he be disciplined enough to look for the next public facility in the neighbourhood? Yes, but why do that if the roadside is a good alternative? I have always wondered why only men indulge in this. That alone should be a lesson to men to hold on and dispose at the right place. So, why are men so? Because this specie is absolutely shameless and crude beyond words?? Can we politely ask the person not to -- at the risk of being the target of the pee-shower??
While it is irrefutable that our government needs to upgrade governance in a lot of ways, it is equally true that individuals have to learn discipline and self regulation in a big way for our society to see some improvement in various areas. Otherwise, we are just doomed to live peacefully in the company tons of garbage, gallons of urine etc whenever we step out of our homes.
