Small Things

One question that keeps haunting me constantly is the following: why do we Indians punish ourselves with unbridled enthusiasm? We are both perpetrators and victims of what can be aptly called as quality of life crimes. We enthusiastically participate in them thus reducing the quality of life collectively. Examples of such crimes are: habitual honking, jumping lanes, driving with the head lights on high beam constantly; spitting tobacco without a care (from within moving vehicles!), littering; and so on.

What are the reasons for this? A lot of times, there is a tendency to sweep away such problems by assigning them to bigger classes of problems such as population, poverty or illiteracy. It's true that our urban population has to face grave competition for resources constantly. But that hardly explains away the problem. There does not seem to be a strong motive -- right or wrong -- for our quality of life crimes, except for shortsightedness and, ahem, downright stupidity. Consider for example, zooming through traffic dangerously only to stop abruptly at the next traffic signal ¹. Or worse, jumping on to a virtually empty lane only to realise a few seconds later that the lane was lying unused for a reason! Isn't it obvious that an empty lane in a peak hour traffic can only mean that the lane is blocked somewhere ahead for some reason like an accident. But commuter after commuter follows the same path, ending up at a barricade, and then struggling to come back to the other lane, thus completing a deadlock.

What is the cause for this? The inefficiency of governments? Or because corporates make immense amounts of money? Is it because we have thousands of castes and languages? Or is it because we ape the west? Perhaps it is because Amitabh Bachan's latest movie flopped or because the TV soaps are not good anymore? I can see that my questions above are increasingly moving towards the absurd. But certainly they are not as absurd as the situations we create for ourselves.

Another common issue is that, there is a huge disconnect between organizations and the community. (In many cases, there is no community even; it's just individuals.) There does not seem to be a sense of belongingness. Each considers the other an opponent! We use buses, but we don't feel a part of it. The staff in the bus and the passengers are cut-throat competitors! Similarly, government offices, banks, parks, restaurants, what have you. The organizations and its staff is one group; the rest of the community is in another group. There is a relentless fight. A park, for example, exists so that a community can make use of it. It is the responsibility of the organization to keep it clean and attractive. At the same time, it is the responsibility of individuals and the community to cooperate by not littering and not disturbing the order. However, the mistrust between the two is so complete that neither cares. It's amazing that nobody even gives a thought to being the first one to cooperate! It should be fairly obvious that people are more reluctant to litter a clean place than one that is already heavily littered; similarly, there is not much incentive to maintain a place that gets littered again as soon as its cleaned.
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That's a load of rant. So, can anything be done at all? I definitely think so. Even in the absence of a strong sense of belongingness to an organization, community or a city, individuals themselves, motivated by self-interest alone, can make a difference however slight be it. Let me again take a traffic situation as an example. How often do you see people people continuing to dash ahead when a green light turns red? Everyone thinks, 'It's just me, I'll cross quickly and people behind me will stop. It's okay.' This continues till a cop starts whistling or a good soul stops voluntarily.

Every time you find yourself at the helm of the traffic and there is a red light imminent, just stop. Don't move until the light turns green despite annoyed honks directed at you from behind. It works. Similarly, don't jump lanes just because the person behind you is in a hurry. What I do when I hear a lot of honking behind me, a lot of times, instead is slow down my bike, sometimes even halt completely, turn back and stare. It works. (Of course, one has to be thick skinned enough to be not bothered about one-off reactions and swearing.)

A few individuals acting independently may not solve problems; but it definitely helps. We operate under tremendous negative feedback: individual insecurities feed on to each other and spiral up instantaneously. We can observe the amount of disruption an individual car causes by jumping lanes. Similarly, if an individual maintains traffic discipline, at least the small region around his car has lesser chaos than the rest of the traffic.

I think a lot of such small things can be done, which I can't understand why we don't. Littering can be controlled to a great extent by making garbage bins easily accessible to people. I see so many times people who normally don't want to litter do so because there simply is no garbage bin nearby. Installing a lot of garbage bins not only controls littering, it also is more economical in the longer run.

A lot of times, it is not clear to individuals whether there is an incentive for acting in a certain way, or what is the incentive if there is one. As a first step, I think it might even help if people start thinking that, at the least, there is no disincentive to do a certain thing. For example, it's not hard for say a small shopkeeper to understand that there is no harm in keeping a couple of garbage bins outside his shop.

¹If a lot of my examples involve traffic situations, it's only because traffic seems to be representative of our problems. Also, traffic is the most common menace.