The other day I was trying to cross the road at Rajpath in Lutyens Delhi I found a zebra crossing adjacent to the traffic signals. Since the lights had just turned red I thought it was safe to cross the road using the zebra crossing. But I was wrong , a white Scorpio with a political Party flag fluttering zipped past me. It nearly brushed me. I was completely zapped, The Scorpio paused after a distance ,just to hurl some much spoken abuses in Hindi and fled away. I remained so stunned that for a moment I almost forgot that I was in the middle of a busy road Any way God was kind and I came home in one peace. The incident reminded me of a passage of a book that I read recently.
This book was about a highly qualified Indian technocrat settled in Bonn Germany. In one of the many conversations that he was having with one of his Indian friend visiting Germany as a tourist is this....
"You see here when a pedestrian is on the zebra crossing all the speeding vehicles would come to halt and allow the pedestrian to cross even if the lights were green.Very very rarely in case any time the pedestrian is hurt, the State bears all his medical expenses not only that the State remains apologetic too. Here in this country every human life is valuable to the State. There is absolutely no discrimination of any sort when it comes to human life. Here you generally feel safe and truly proud of being one among the ordinary.
Yes I do am thankful to my country India where I grew up and qualified my IIT and also got a good govt job. Unfortunately the job I was doing there was most unrelated to my stream of studies . My promotions I realized was more depended on how pally I was to my superiors than the work that I deliver. Over the time I realized that for ordinary people the State showed no mercy. .Even though I had an extraordinary academics and fairly a great job, at the end of the day I remained one among the billions of ordinary people .In India you need to be a Neta or a big Industrialist or a highly politically connected bureaucrat to be able to make your life valuable to the State."
How true it was I said to myself as I reflected upon my Zebra crossing incident. We here in India talk of the brain drain without understanding the reason for it. Today almost 15% of our population remain settled in western countries mainly in US and Europe. This does not make them unpatriotic or un-Indian. Some of them are absolutely more patriotic than us and remain more proud to be an Indian.
Our political and Democratic systems are hopelessly vulnerable to political pulls, their muscle power and their hooliganism .Here when a politician dies, he not only gets a State funeral but also the entire traffic and works comes to a stands still. Right from his funeral cost to the ongoing maintenance of his Samadhi are done on tax payer's money. Not even an ambulance with a critical patient riding it is spared when a political leader's procession or convoy pass through the road On the other side when an ordinary man remains lynched to death, his death becomes a politics of opportunity and his loss and his family's pains becomes simply the Media's TRP Here political muscle power sniff more human lives than diseases.
State here is more protective towards life of selective animals than human lives. The only time when citizens feel politically important and even pampered..is during election times.
We the ordinary people who have authored this Democracy are responsible for making the politicians a devil's incarnation and our lives miserable and chaotic.
In India today the lives of the ordinary man on the street remain endangered while the State devote their quality time in saving the endangered species and we the ordinary people continue to remain the most dispensable commodity to the State. It is truly an irony to know that we the ordinary people are the essence of this Democracy !
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