Image for representation purposes only.
At the school drop-off this morning (Maryam’s final exams have begun and, as promised, I am on daily drop-and-pick-up duty), I watched a police car with its lights flashing weave through traffic, run red lights as though they were ornamental, cut across lanes with casual authority, and disgorge two young girls in uniform at the gate. When I pointed this out to the driver, he genuinely did not understand a word I was saying, whether about the appropriateness of using an official vehicle for a school run, whether the lights ought to have been switched on for such a purpose, or whether he realised that in the brief 120 seconds he occupied my line of sight he had brazenly broken half a dozen rules in a car issued to a lawkeeper.
I realised, almost at once, that I should not be surprised. This is not unusual. This is not rare. This is, in fact, us. This is India.
Indeed, nearly everything (well, I exaggerate, but only slightly) that is wrong with India and Indian society, and with me, because I am as complicit in this civilisational erosion as anyone, perhaps more so for having the education and exposure to know better and yet doing precious little about it, can be observed outside any high-end school at the beginning or end of the day. Watch the parents, 100% highly educated, well-travelled, fully exposed to global etiquette, perfectly aware of traffic rules (and scrupulous in following them when, not if, they are outside the country, for they have travelled abroad often enough, know exactly how things work, and transform into model citizens the moment they land at Heathrow or JFK), in their expensive cars (some with drivers, some even liveried), and count the number of violations committed in the simple act of dropping off or picking up a child. The double parking. The blocked exits. The honking at pedestrians. The slow, entitled glide into no-parking zones. The impunity with which it is done; the unexamined assumption that one’s own urgency outweighs everyone else’s inconvenience.
Privilege does not merely enable this behaviour; it blesses, baptises, and reinforces it by teaching nothing, least of all the experience of suffering consequences of their actions and words. This is tragic. No truly, as a civilisation, as a society, as a culture, as a nation, we are on the wrong path. And accelerating towards certain disaster, assuming we aren’t there already.
My father used to say,
Any society that forgets the Golden Rule of doing unto others as they would have done to themselves is doomed.
I see that forgetting happening everywhere in India, even in myself (and this is the part that stings), in my own impatience, my own small selfishness, my own readiness to disregard the next person’s time or comfort when it does not suit me.
We do not queue; we do not clean up after ourselves; we litter with impunity; we spit and blow our noses on the road; we relieve ourselves in public with alarming nonchalance; we talk loudly in restaurants, on trains, in hospital corridors where people are dying; we even watch YouTube videos on full volume, oblivious to the world around us; we do not wear masks voluntarily when ill; we leave our dirty plates on Food Court tables for someone else to clear; we disregard traffic laws, whether in terms of red lights, zebra crossings, one-ways, parking, vehicle loading, lane discipline, or even the simple but mandatory helmets and seat belts; we block roads for our festivals, as if public thoroughfares were private property; we leave our beds deliberately messy for the housekeeping in hotels, a curious form of entitlement masquerading as ease; indeed, we are perpetually aggravating and yet, somehow, perpetually aggrieved.
And we grant ourselves a permanent moral exemption because (1) the British (whatever that means, as though a destructive 190-year rule absolves us of personal responsibility in perpetuity), and (2) culture (whatever THAT means, as though invoking “culture” is a spell that dissolves cruelty, indifference, and laziness into heritage). We are so busy issuing ourselves free passes that we rarely extend grace to others. You’ll notice, in fact, that even in writing this, I am indicting everyone whilst standing firmly among them. That is the level of our hypocrisy.
The truly devastating part, the part that sits heavily in the gut, is that we do all of this whilst sending our children to schools where they are taught empathy, civic responsibility, the social contract, global citizenship; schools with polished mission statements about creating future leaders; classrooms where they learn that society functions only when individuals restrain themselves for the common good. And then we collect those same children in illegally parked cars, honking at pedestrians on zebra crossings, modelling with absolute clarity that rules are elastic, that might confers right, that consideration is optional, that getting yours before someone else gets theirs is the only real commandment.
And I wonder, not rhetorically but fearfully, what sort of country we are building through these daily micro-betrayals; what sort of people we are becoming through habits we dismiss as trivial; whether my father was right; and whether one day my daughter will look at me, at my generation, and realise that the decay she inherits was not imposed upon us by history or empire or culture, but cultivated patiently, lovingly, parent by parent, car by car, right outside the school gate where the last period was, invariably, moral science.
