Saturday, December 26, 2009

Inculcating governance through traffic rules

Governance will be the order of the day in 21st century. The backbone of governance is the ethics and value system in a society and the irony is that you can’t teach ethics and values to anyone. Values and ethics evolve over a period of time through the dynamism of culture. The dynamism of culture particularly in India has been following a downward mobility towards convenience rather than a robust value system requiring high levels of self discipline. Some one has rightly defined ethics as a choice of decision one make while facing a red traffic signal light on a deserted road in winters at midnight. It is not important that whether he should jump a red light or not ; the important aspect is whether he is bothered about the red light or not.

People would soon start believing that the traffic sense in any society would be a unitary measure of state of entropy in their social system. On a busy road in a metro or on a highway or in the hustling lanes of small towns, road manners are the true measures of rowdiness around. It is felt that the mannerism divide on the road is bigger than the financial divide in our society. The majority of the society is hoarding more and more money by all means to gain power and not to earn prestige. The road manners displayed by a citizen are symbolic to the character of the personality and true indicator of the level of ethics underlying all of her thoughts , acts and deeds.

The society in true sense is exuberating power by breaking traffic rules rather than attempting to create a benchmark for others by following the same rules. Even the system is found in an embarrassing situation to handle such situation of chaos. Due to bureaucratic setup we have been classically conditioned to succumb to circumstances being created by the glitter of wealth. Neither a petty traffic inspector nor the highest judicial personnel could ever do justice to his duties while handling any direct or indirect violation of traffic law by these miscreants. It will be too foolish to consider these petty incidences of traffic indiscipline in our society to be considered as a cause of concern in 21st century. Such incidences are more or less routine and are now hardly get noticed also due to conditioning of all our senses.

However the message which these incidences carries to the up coming generation in India is a key destroyer of the high value system in any society. Everyone is living in a highly over communicated society. We come across thousands of messages everyday and later our cognitive processes help us to organize and interpret them in a unique manner. Such incidences of traffic irregularities and partial behavior of our system to handle such cases would simply paint a highly corrupt picture of our public security system. If we do not develop a uniform law at least for the traffic on road in true sense then we may end up painting the image of an ideal citizen to be the one with lots of money and a free will to break red lights , have dark films on the windows, over speeding, taking lives and endangering other lives regularly and above all a person most respected in the public functions of his area.