Sometimes I wonder where we all got it from. I believe that as a race nobody trivialises issues, concepts, ideas and acts, as we do. Disregard the dire consequences, we are able to trivialise everything, we are also able to trivialise the consequences and simply move on.
Go to any construction site and you would find a prominent sign board that says “hard hat zone”. If you ever wear the so-called “hard hat”, you would realise that it is anything but safe. But we do not stop there, the so-called hard hat, hardened with the callousness of centuries, has been innovatively modified so that women workers can carry bricks on top of their hard hats! Our faceless workers march toward their construction sites every morning, hard hat on head and sometimes in hand, in their undernourishment, somewhat legitimate in the state of their human displacement.
The other day I saw a large piece of disputed land getting cleared up. Such a development signals a fresh partnership between a politician, a criminal and a builder. It has one more step to go before a mall or a multi-storey building would come up on the spot.
A few days later, the intermediate step unfolds itself, a giant wheel appears, the place gets filled with fairground equipment and food stalls.
To my colleague’s wife across the road, I plead not to send the kids. The safety norms followed by people who set up the so-called “theme parks” in this country are so abysmal; I see death traps in most of them.
Last week, that same giant wheel got stuck; four hours of firemen’s efforts finally brought the stranded children down. Human life is least valued in a country that sees bulk-deaths every day, ferries capsize, school buses turn turtle, auto-rickshaws laden with children, like a tractor carrying pumpkins, collide with oncoming trucks. We trivialise the lives of our own children.
My company has word-class infrastructure, as do many of modern India’s workplaces. But we have no control over the city’s
sanitation and drinking water system. Last year, a young engineer’s one-year-old son died of dengue in Bangalore city — the face of Brand India, and another colleague ended up for a week in a hospital after being diagnosed with chikungunya.
Our cities are waiting for epidemics to break out, but whether it is the cooped chicken kept alive in unsanitary conditions before being dressed up to appear on the plates of five star hotels or the fish fed with hazardous chemicals before being sold, we usher in yet another day in the sanctity of our gated communities, hoping that a page 3 existence is insurance from air and water-borne diseases.
In the last week alone, two of my colleagues have reported that their aging parents have been diagnosed with tuberculosis and though treatment is available for it, the medication is so strong that the elderly would die from the after effects! We have the power to trivialise basic public health and sanitation, like nobody else has.
Business folks are no different. We celebrate the telecommunications revolution in the country, we cry hoarse about how the penetration of the cell phone has changed the global paradigm and made India more advanced than the most advanced countries, but operators trivialise the issue of availability such that call drop rates have mounted like water hyacinth in the monsoon and regulators are asleep even as those dropped calls end up improving the bottom line of the very same operators who urge, “Bol India Bol”.
Infrastructure sizing is not thought through while issuing free life-time pre-paid connections as long as we can mop up the money at the bottom of the pyramid and move it someplace else.
So, we can get an “International MBA” degree by walking into a roadside refurbished, erstwhile cycle repair shop, we can learn spoken English in six weeks, we can go to a computer course and learn C++ with a guaranteed project work and placement despite one’s total lack of math-logical aptitude, we can become an air-hostess or a nurse “ready to fly to USA” by attending a training course atop a dosa-idly joint, we can become just anything, if we are simply alive in India today. The power to trivialise things has even been legitimised by government standing to protect the rule of law that syndicates the support of convicted murderers to save itself in the largest democracy of the world. We trivialise the word democracy.
When, but when, would we learn not to trivialise things. Indeed, we are Incredible India.