The Civil Disobedience Movement

I am sometimes astounded when some people enjoy breaking or disobeying the rules – they just love it, more particularly in case of traffic rules or acts on streets. I cannot really comprehend their sense of pride. Spitting, littering around is very common on our streets, even if there is a thrash bin few steps away. Right at the gates of a hospital or a school, crackers will be fired at eardrum crackling decibels just to announce that some politician is visiting or visited or just passing by through that lane in the locality. A truck driver once spat so much of paan debris out of his truck window that it coloured my little white Maruti 800 with red, as if my darling car had just had her first menstrual cycle. “Bhennn………”, I swallowed rest of the word as I muttered furiously looking out of the windshield, but the driver had accelerated away without being bothered at all.

I travel to office everyday, say from point A to B. At peak hours, it is quite obvious that the traffic, at some particular patches would be congested and slow moving. I have to go through this everyday; a 15 minute journey escalates to anything between 30 to 45 minutes. Now some over smart fellow, in an attempt to reach early, shifts in the opposite lane (road from B to A) and starts traveling towards B. Few others follow him, then there are more, and more, and more. Soon the traffic moving from B to A is at a standstill because these over rulers of discipline have clogged the entire road. The traffic can neither move ahead nor backward. Then there is a loud noisy orchestra by all the vehicles, which irritate even more, adding to the frustration of being strangulated in the traffic – for no fault of mine, of course. Out of the twenty days that I travel, I see such cases at least five times. Just one act of disobedience has had a cascading effect on many others. When would we learn to follow some rules? I don’t know either. If we don’t agree to obey the rules, can’t we try and apply a little common sense, as to what could be the reaction of our disobedient action.

I thought may be it was lack of education (literacy) and hence the inability to reason out things. However, I was proved wrong with my analysis and made to fall flat on my face, when I see most such bikers and car owners clad in elegant attires and ties, halt at the gates of some reputed IT companies – they surely are educated, and probably logical too. Again, these would be the among the same people, who for some official work, have toured foreign countries, and on their return would brag about US, Europe, Australia; “Ahhh…what amazing traffic rules they have in London”, “My my…the roads in US are so clean and clear, the people are so disciplined here”. If you like seeing all that in a foreign land, why can’t you practice the same in your homeland.

Not that I have been 100 percent disciplined. I have crossed the roads when the traffic signal shows red colour for pedestrians, I have never used the zebra crossing (I learnt this in school, but I hardly found those black white stripes on the roads), I have taken a pamphlet from one of those distribution boys standing outside that railways stations and made a paper airplane out of it, and enjoyed watching it fly for sometime – it then just used to go and fall somewhere, I hardly bothered even to look back, I have sometimes spat the chewing gum out and tried to kick it with my shoes and see how far it goes – most of the times it just remained stuck to my shoe. I have done all this, II must confess; but stopped since last 3 years now, I sometimes cross empty roads though without looking at the traffic lights.

I see people overriding traffic signals, not observing traffic rules, and then negotiating the bribe amount with the police on the street sides. I had once paid Rs. 500 fine for driving without a license; I had an option to pay the police Rs. 150 (without receipt) and drive away (bribery is NO NO for me in a big way – I had lost my MSEB posting in 2003 just because I wasn’t ready to pay the medical officer Rs. 1000 for a medical clearance). There are some who exploit the rules under pretext of being a relative to some high profile politician, advocate, and press personnel, and so on. “I have been driving my bike without license for five years, just because I have ‘Advocate – High Court’ sticker on my bike” – is not something to boast about, shouldn’t a high court lawyer being the first person to follow and obey the laws?

Thus there are similar such incidents that even you must have witnessed at some point in your life. We probably have vowed to be disobedient and unlawful. The meanings and motives might have changes, but we still practice the “Civil Disobedience Movement” that Mahatma Gandhi had started way back in 1930. We love to break the rules, we feel proud to be disobedient, as if “disobedience is my birth right and I shall exercise it”, in India at least.