Saturday 29 November 2014

Civilisation?

Is there any room for such barbarity in a civilised country:
  • people zoom through an intersection even when the signal is red?
  • people park their cars and motorcycles on pavements, blithely impervious to the inconvenience this causes by blocking the only possibly safe space for people to walk, people with locomotor disabilities to use their wheelchairs, blind people to try to navigate a safe distance from the ubiquitous automobiles?
  • or even worse, when the roads are full of cars stalled in a traffic jam, motorcycles start zooming on the pavements - assuming pavements exist and are even, with cutaways to easily get on to and off from the pavement?
  • it is not feasible to keep tactile tiles on pavements, since miscreants remove such tiles and take them away for god knows what use their perverted minds wish to put them to?
  • groups of disability activists have to periodically make access audits prior to making fervent pleas to  all and sundry to refrain from such inconsiderate practices that are constantly infringing on and depriving them of their rights to lead their lives independently, and with dignity?
  • people of all ages periodically throw plastic bags on the road after their contents have been used/consumed?
  • men unzip their flies and `let fly' in random public places?
  • close to half the population has no access to toilets at home, and defecate out in the open - often on the banks of water bodies (even the supposedly sacred Ganges, Brahmaputra and Cauvery not being exempt from such pollution)? and people of `high castes' insist on doing this and forcing people of `low caste' to scrape their s..t off the ground and carry basket loads of such `night-soil', as it is euphemistically called, to dump it god knows where?
  • Whenever there are blocks in the sewage system, people of the same Dalit classes are `employed' to get into the sewers without any protection of any sort to unclog the mess; not a week goes by without your reading in the papers that two or three such `cleaners' lost their lives by having inhaled noxious fumes when they went down into the drains, AND that this inhuman practice of people diving into s..t had been declared illegal some n years ago.

Yet, all these unholy practices continue unabated in my land with its fabled culture of several millennia! If this is civilisation, please give me the era of the caveman!

No comments:

Post a Comment