We reached the court early today for our marriage counselling, or what passes for it. I saw the total pandemonium (for there is no other way to describe the atmosphere) around the court, all of which is now familiar to someone who’s been to more court dates than he cares to remember. This isn’t an unusual situation. No war or conflict has broken out. Nobody is being murdered though it seems as if several crimes are in progress simultaneously. The unusual part is that everyone is going about their ‘business’ without even acknowledging their surroundings, except for a fleeting hello or wave. Much like how Indians sit to defecate in the open in groups where there’s some kind of tacit understanding to casually acknowledge as well as studiously ignore others’ presence, except your really close friends who will casually chat with each other as if it’s perfectly normal.
My observation is that more laws are broken outside India’s courts than are upheld inside.
Ditto for RTO offices across the country, outside of each, if one were to see the casual flaunting of traffic rules and the Motor Vehicle Act, one would be, if one weren’t born and raised in India, quite surprised at the audacity of those breaching the law and the impotence, or perhaps apathy, of those who are expected, indeed appointed to safeguard that very law.
Sometimes I wonder if all the non-Indian, ‘Western’ (mainly white and colonial) writers who exoticised this civilisation and its culture, the film-makers who still use a yellow filter to shoot commotion-filled disorganised bazaar scenes as indicative of ‘India’, and the foreign political leaders who describe this country as filthy or a mish-mash of things were that much off the mark and what the ‘5,000 years of continuous civilisation’ has ended with to show for itself.
Why do we so love to break the law? Or is it that we don’t care and our breaking of it has little to do with a positive notion of wanting to do something (break the law) and more to do with being indifferent to it and just carrying on doing what one wishes, without bothering to check if it is within or outside the law?
This is not, of course, what troubles me as much as the fact that we have a word for this and we take pride in our ability to bend and break what shouldn’t be either bent or broken. And we are addicted to it now. We gravitate towards a stop-gap, law breaching, short-term solution as our first line of attack rather than the last line of defence. We must rid ourselves of the ‘it’s not a bug, it’s a feature’ attitude at the earliest if we have any dreams of actually becoming a Vishwaguru.
But that would mean first accepting that we aren’t one already. And as you know, therein lies the nub.
P.S: I wrote about something similar back in 2012. FWIW, here it is.
