I found that by 11.30 am I had finished class and had nothing to do -- one doesn't always like to think of one's backlog, but that being another story, I'll get back to the point. Finding ourselves at a loose end, two friends and I decided to go out for lunch. I'm not going to get into the menu or the decor or anything else of the sort; Goodness knows, far too many people than one would like leave the rest of the world to read about the length of time they spend everyday on taking their pets for a walk. It's the drive down to the restaurant which really drove me nuts. So that's what I'll leave you read about instead. Don't complain; there's absolutely nothing forcing you to read the rest of this post. 1) We are in fact supposed to drive on the LEFT side of the road in India. Not on the right and certainly not right on top of the divider, and lanes do in fact exist for a reason. A while ago, some official had the bright idea of marking lanes with chained fences. At the time, I thought that it was pure insanity because the iron posts and chains were next to impossible to see at night especially with street lights not always working, but I am now beginning to understand the kind of exasperation which would make someone want to erect such fences. 2) It is NOT optional to indicate while turning; it is mandatory and beginning to indicate with your hand since your indicators are broken beyond repair when you're halfway across the road is simply not good enough. What on earth is the point of doing that anyway? You aren't transparent and unless you plan to park in the middle of the road -- which, honestly, I wouldn't put beyond you -- once you're already half way across, we know that you want to make it to the other side even if the prospect of being left with a huge dent on one side of your vehicle is a non-issue to you. 3) It is not acceptable to keep banging on someone's window at a traffic light because you want them to buy something from / for you or to give you cash, and if you do, you'd better not complain if you get injured when the light changes and the traffic begins to move. It isn't even acceptable to hold a prescription for antibiotics against someone's window and make strange faces if the date on the prescription has been changed more times than the Constitution of India has been amended. 4) Manufacturers should hand out a pamphlet along with horns to tell people that they are NOT the modern-day equivalents of magicians' wands to clear up all the traffic in front of one. Today, much to my shock, I actually told the chap behind me to SHUT UP after having had to listen to him toot half a dozen times because of a traffic jam. Either fortunately (or not), being holed up in a car, I don't think that he actually heard me but it felt good to shout although I later felt a bit guilty. I started off the morning with two discussions about: a) The causes of custodial deaths: Apparently some chap died in police custody in Aundh, Pune, India yesterday (http://cities.expressindia.com/fullstory.php?newsid=97573) and b) How the death penalty should be imposed: As I was telling a friend in an eMail I just wrote a while ago, you'd imagine that people would want to at least enforce capital punishment humanely if they were hell bent on seeing it implemented at all but NO! ...it turns out that a lot of people actually want to see the person SUFFER. I was stunned to hear some people whom I actually think are nice talk about how a lethal injection is too mild. They'd prefer things like electrocuting criminals and if the poor sods wind up frying for half an hour, well, so much the better! The discussions, needless to say, left me feeling more than a little depressed. I am finally beginning to understand how the implementation of law doesn't always have much to do with common sense -- here, I remember a talk about contracts which basically comprised a long series of cases to explain what a proposal is. One which I found a bit strange (or at least stranger than the others) was where a boy ran away from home. His uncle sent a servant to look for him and then issued handbills offering a reward of 501 INR to get the boy back. The servant found the boy but the uncle didn't pay him the reward. The servant filed a case for it but his action failed because apparently, he found out only after the return of the boy that a reward was being offered, and without knowledge of the proposal, there could be no acceptance and therefore no contract to pay the reward existed even though it was a general offer. I was reminded of Polonius saying, "Though this be madness, yet there is method in 't," in Shakespeare's Hamlet although of course, there are some lawyers who are honest enough to admit that one often gets law in courts today and not justice. But even leaving the implementation of law aside, what I think is sad is that laws are not always implementable. For example, the other day a friend of mine was talking about how Indian women are no better off than women in some fundamentalist theocratic states in terms of rights and freedoms and if one looks at it, in a way, that is true -- the only difference is that while India has the laws to promote equality, protect women etc., they very often don't have the laws at all. And, perhaps, she was right in saying that there's no difference because there's very little point in having laws if they're made only to be broken. A number of laws have such huge loopholes in them that it isn't very difficult to drive horse carriages right through them. Just to mention one such law, The Dowry Prohibition Act, 1961 made it a crime to both take and GIVE dowry, so people who are forced into giving one, in a way, are also on the wrong side of the law. Also, in the infamous Prevention of Domestic Violence Bill, 2002 the law very conveniently didn't clearly define domestic violence itself so its implementation would have been difficult if not next to impossible. It said, "Domestic violence: (1) For the purposes of this Act, any conduct of the respondent shall constitute domestic violence if he,- (a) habitually assaults or makes the life of the aggrieved person miserable by cruelty of conduct even if such conduct does not amount to physical ill-treatment... etc." The problem was that no one knew what 'habitually' meant. Was it once a day? Once a week? On the first Tuesday of every year? I don't know but to my mind, it could well be that problems in implementing existing laws are what lead to disasters like the murder of Akku Yadav where, as 'The Week' reported, "On August 13, the women of Kasturba Nagar in Nagpur killed Bhalchandra Kalicharan alias Akku Yadav, who allegedly had raped more than 20 women. In what sociologists later called "an outrage of justice", they lynched him in a courtroom." Perhaps it isn't such a good idea to shout at people even if their vehicles' horns do leave you at the edge of insanity. I think that that's what has really been bothering me -- this strange combination of some people behaving badly and then others reacting by behaving even more badly to satisfy themselves that 'justice' has been served whether it's in terms of the implementation of the law or the lack thereof.
References:
Akku Yadav : http://www.the-week.com/24aug29/currentevents_article6.htm
Uday Jagannath Bhandge (23) : http://cities.expressindia.com/fullstory.php?newsid=97573
