India no laughing matter!

India in the eyes of many is a complex, organic, chaotic place, full of promise and yet brimming with so many qualities that make it confusing, and hard to define. We even take pride in this chaos, and consider it part of our lives in this romantic mess called India. It is almost as if some country in the world had to stand up to play the part of the chaotic idiot, and we chose it out of love for the depth of character it promised.

In the chaos, a lot of us see an order that is hard to recreate elsewhere, for this order is something that just comes to be, not one designed to be that way. The traffic on our roads is the prime example for this order within chaos. I have heard a friend define it as a "lyrical dance" of vehicles! Well the dance isn't that lyrical considering how many Indians die in road accidents every day, unless we are now willing to venture into being part of the cosmic whole and that those people were destined to die anyway.

I wonder how we would take it if the Indian Air Force refused to react to Pakistan invading India and just allowed an organic chaos to take over, of course completely convinced that we are part of a cosmic whole and that nothing is really real. I wonder how it would be if we stopped manufacturing medicines and our doctors went on permanent leave, since people were going to die at designated times anyway.

Truth is, we Indians love chaos until it becomes life threatening. Not just any life threatening, but OUR life threatening. We are that selfish. We are that callous about public behaviour. We are heartless, but love to live in our cocoon of suspended disbelief that we are a compassionate people, that really care about other people's lives. We do not. Perhaps we do not wish ill upon others, but we don't really care what happens to others, even though we are perfectly happy to subscribe to a system that causes needless chaos.

We are not torn between a rational today and a culture of very dense superstitions. We are torn between our laziness and a need to do our duty in a democratic set up. We are torn between the demands of civic responsibility and our dearly held and protected indifference to all things that do not immediately affect our well being.

Oh, we do take up moral policing quite regularly. Especially when policemen confront couples on bikes late at night, for example. There is nothing in the constitution that makes it illegal for a man and a woman to be taking a motorcycle ride late at night, and yet, all the questions from the police will usually be aimed at establishing the intent of the ride, not the legality of it. We love moral policing and we are particularly good at doing it when we have the safety of not being bitten by the person being questioned.

Is this a call for us to seek legal help to maintain our freedoms? Most certainly it is. It is time we became a litigious society where we fought for our rights to lead peaceful lives, where the chaos loving maniacs cannot threaten our lives with lousy driving habits, or the moral policing habits of mob-minded Indians drive us to lead invisible lives.

We are not a great country when we have to make adjustments for imperfections we do not subscribe to. We will never be a great country until EVERY single constitutional right and freedom of EVERY single citizen can be absolutely taken for granted, without question, without ambiguity and without exception.

There is nothing to be proud of this chaotic country we currently call our own. There is definitely nothing beautiful about a lack of a certain order that can prevent casualties, and there certainly is nothing to appreciate about traditions that are thousands of years old when we behave like we did a million years ago.