Generation of Degeneration

My last post was after a long time. I'm glad that a lot of people liked it, which gave me that much more incentive to write again on a more regular basis. Thanks to all for that.

Time was always a constraint, but more than that being able to sit in a quiet calm place and gather my thoughts into a meaningful post was not happening.

Most of my previous drafts ended up as '..half a page of scribbled lines'.

Anyway, coming to this post.

A few months back I was riding my two wheeler to make an appointment in Sadashivnagar. Just as I entered the by lane, I got flagged down by a traffic cop.
I had turned left on a green signal, had worn a helmet, and to my knowledge had broken no traffic rule.
I still got fined for a faulty registration plate. And mine was a new Vespa, which had not completed even a year. I was flummoxed.

The cop tried to fleece me by saying that the fine would run up to 400 rupees. When I insisted, he agreed to let me pay a fine of 100.

On my way back home, I had a lot running on in my mind on what had just happened. 

Just at that moment, a bunch of youngsters broke the traffic signal, vehemently even went on the wrong side of the road and just disappeared.
And all this, within a hundred metres of where I got fined. I was pretty pissed at the situation. 

Why can't the traffic policy focus on catching these kind of offenders, instead of enforcing some absurd rule, which no one would ever know of.

Having grown up all my life in Bangalore, I am beginning to hate the way things are turning out. I'm sure things are just as bad any place else in India, if not worse.

Traffic has always been bad for the past 10 years or so. But the brazen impunity with which people have started breaking the most basic traffic rules is what's irritating me.

Riding on the footpath, breaking the signals, driving on the wrong side of a wrong having medians are some of the things we see daily.

And its not just the seemingly uneducated auto-rickshaw or cab drivers who do this. Everyone else does it as well. And a good number of people are complicit, when we sit or sleep comfortably in our office cabs and let the driver flout the rules.

This brings me to a few questions.

 "What's the point of our education?" 

"What could be worse than this?"

"What example do we set for our future generations?"

"Do we want to get things done at cost, even it's not right?"

Surely this is not my idea of Acche Din.

We could extend this to almost every aspect of our daily lives.  

I was talking to my colleague Ajay on a related topic a few weeks back. We discussed on the possibilities - stricter enforcement of the law to create a strong deterrence, mandatory training. But most important of all we spoke about the need for a strong value system right from the young age, at the home and school level itself.

In my last trip to Germany, one of my German colleagues told that in school they are taught about Hitler and his regime. This is to remind them that such mistakes should never be repeated ever.

Ajay returned to India after living more than ten years in Germany, where he had done his higher education and had worked for a long time as well. He then went on to make a statement, for which I was taken aback. 

"Santosh, I think there should be a big war sometime soon and the whole country gets destroyed. Then we should rebuild it all over again."

At first, it sounded a good option to me. My team mates also seemed to concur, while we were discussing this amongst a few other random things during our road trip to Interlaken.

But in reality,

"Are we ready to pay the price? 

Can we afford it?

Do we really something like this to set us right?
Is there a better way to deal with it?"