Being Odia

Being an Odia in Odisha whose fate is tied and tightly coupled with the whims and fancies of another Odia would speak of another Odisha which it never was or should be.

For centuries we have proved that we make very good servants, sincere, loyal, and honest; efficiency was not expected from the one who just has to guard the post to protect his master's interest. From being the Balasore Bearers to a Babu in the highest office and now as waiters and security guards in metros we have done every role because the lure of risk-free, easy, and secure life is hard to resist. It's time we resurrected that dormant gene that made some of us kings and emperors.

Though after seeing our current practice of servility and the way it gets rewarded, it fills me with doubt if the kings of the past were bred and raised here or were imported.

Let's stop stealing from our master's warehouse and treasury to build our riches and also stop managing his business well and wait indefinitely for him to give us the reward and certificate of good conduct; let's build it on our own. Both share the same easy path to a secure life, differentiated only by honesty. Stop behaving like a king with his power of attorney in your hand; because he can annul it anytime. Great servants never build great nations; they live off it.

Let's build the courage to do something new, hit the monolith with a disruptive thought and idea, design a different method, a product, break new grounds, shake the status quo at its base, and push our art, language, and endowments to the next level by creating things anew, be an employer and not just aspire to be a very civil servant as the symbol of our collective and ultimate aspiration if we want our state to regain its past glory.

Stop being delusional about our past when the present doesn't promise a glorious future. Let's help each other to do things that are different.

My Utkala Dibasa thought.

Bhubaneswar – The city which adopted this nomad.

Vividly remember that Sunday afternoon in the summer of 1974 when Baba drove us to a plot he had recently acquired.

After crossing the last human habitation with some rickety unimpressive houses at Acharya Vihar, we were on the highway towards Khurda. After about a kilometre plus he turned right to a barren geography with no shrub in sight. New roads were being demarcated with mounds of aggregates dotting the sides of stormwater drains. Our Jeep rattled on it and stopped at a point where the road ended and overlooked a valley. We were asked to get down and Baba proudly showed us his first material acquisition after struggling for a decade plus to raise his 4 children.

 

Maa, as a forest officer's wife was too used to living in mini estates and was least impressed with this postage stamp-sized plot. To her, plots are measured in acres, not square feet. She sarcastically suggested that ideally, he should have bought some land a bit ahead which would have been easier for us to take care of cultivation at our ancestral village near Chilka. With the ego of the man of the house punctured, the drive back can only be expected to be in uncomfortable silence.

 

That was IRC Village then. Can't tell about others, but a part of me stayed back at that exact spot constantly beaconing me to return.

 

Born into a nomadic life because of constant transfers of Baba, we were to hop from place to place every two, or three years, get attached to that setting and agree to a willful separation and strike root at an unknown place. This perhaps gave me a stronger heart to drop people and deal with future disappointments and breakups.

But while living that peripatetic life, my mind always wanted to come to that spot someday in the future and settle down.

 

Another chance transfer in 1986 made us denizens of this city which I had longed to be a part of since 74. This place has seen our family of 6 grow to 18 at its peak and with all the life's dramas - the birth of my children and the death of my father. Never thought of leaving it even once and I'm sure this place will witness my final journey.

 

At times I ask myself what drew me to this city. I came here with zero friends and no relatives to speak of and with no dreams or ambitions - I just wanted to be here. Was I running away from my past? No! Then?

 

The words of two people partially answer my question.

 

Baba used to say that it's in the soil. He jokingly attributed the color red to the blood of his ancestors who had valiantly fought off invaders and staged mutinies. And of Priyadarshy Dash Bhaina when he said, he agreed to a lesser pay package while opting for a shift to Bhubaneswar because he would get a few lakhs worth of free breeze every evening to make good. Its appeal and magnetism perhaps lie in its air and soil.

 

This city which has housed us and shaped our lives and nurtured our dreams has completed 75 years today and at 75, two things still look beautiful, the city you love and your mother.

 

It's on us how we together shape its future.

A father’s letter to his daughter

Dear,

Today is your first day at your office and your first step into the world as a professional. I as a father feel I must tell you certain home truths and things that will help you take on the uncertain water and navigate in the new world filled with unknown people and their unknown interests.

 

Leap not with romantic hopes but with practical understanding.

 

A Job is an opportunity:

It’s not a job, it’s also not a trophy you have bagged. It’s a responsibility that you have agreed to take. Be thankful that you got this opportunity to show your talent, give back to your organization and learn from others. Evaluate the opportunity in terms of the quality of responsibility the organization gives you. Responsibility is not a burden; it’s a silent acknowledgment of your capability and the trust that the organization reposes in you. It's invaluable for your growth and learning and much bigger than the CTC. Make the best of it.

 

Gratitude:

Only some get this opportunity. A hundred factors have coincided to bring you where you are today. Remain in gratitude for your upbringing, grace, good wishes, and blessings of many known and unknown to you.

 

You are just not a packaged skill:

Remember in the initial days you will be evaluated based on your attitude towards work, learning, and people, not on your skill sets. The organization will evaluate you on how well you deal with people, how committed you are to your responsibilities, and how open you are to exploring and learning new things and delivering them at work.   

 

Let your conduct speak:

Build your professional reputation by being punctual, being attentive during a discussion, showing sincerity by seeking clarification and help, and demonstrating commitment by delivering things on time. A reminder is a negative score you earn.

 

Respect and Command Respect:

Respect is not demonstrated through obsequity, it is communicated through activities and behavior. Be respectful towards others and be watchful of your boundaries; guard them against being breached.

 

Pleasantness:

Everyone loves a pleasing personality. Differentiate between friendliness and pleasantness. Exude pleasantness, positivity, energy, smartness, and team spirit. You communicate a lot through how you dress and groomed and how you deal with people who are lower to you in order.

 

Shun Negativities:

The organization will not treat you the way you want it to treat you. You will encounter unfairness and bias. Don’t jump to a conclusion. You won’t see the total picture when you are a party. The organization could be having its compulsions and reasons. Control your envy, jealousy, and the urge to pull others down when you feel side-lined. Don't discuss anything negative about your friends, relatives, colleagues, or organization. Never express your disappointment in public. Never!

 

Opportunities to learn:

The opportunity will make you realize how little you know and how much is out there to be learned. The time you have in hand should be spent learning newer things and acquiring newer skills to be a smart problem solver. Self-improvement is key to long-term success. Better your best.

 

A job is the best fit:

Remember that organizations will hire you when they need you for solving a specific problem they are facing then. The old models of organizations are fast disappearing. Organizations are becoming lean and changing quickly because they have come to realize that they only can survive when they change fast with the changing time. See your job as the best fit for demand at that time and your ability to supply the same. Evaluate how much did you contribute to the revenue side of the organization. You will be important if there is a need for it. A job is not a personal relationship or a life-long commitment. They are not obliged to help and support you achieve your personal goals and your career dreams.

 

It's a very important day in your life as from today you are going to wear your own identity. You will be identified and recognized for your work and not as my daughter anymore. You will create your relevance in the organization and over the next few years discover how successful you have become. All these can happen with your effort and at your own cost. The world will take you through your paces. It will be a testing time for our years of upbringing, education, skill, and attitude all combined.

 

Wish you Godspeed!

Sunday Blues and our perpetual fight with Procrastination

It’s a Sunday afternoon and after the post-lunch siesta, I wake up to a mixed feeling of having lost out, being left behind, guilty, and filled with self-doubt - a sense of dejà vu.

Familiar with it; deep down I know that this will continue till I reach the office and start taking up things. I have lived through this feeling since my adolescence and only recently realized that many adults like me do undergo this feeling routinely and it has a name.

It is called ‘Sunday Blues’.

Research shows that about 66% of the respondents in the UK experience ‘Sunday Blues’ anxiety triggered by thoughts of work the following day. Things are also the same here it seems. For someone who has a punishing 6-day work schedule wasting 50% of his weekend time in a state of gloom is not happy news. Also, not good news for a professional who is suffering from work-related anxieties regularly.

What we are seeing here is the beginning of stress.

In our professional lives, we have to commit ourselves to some delivery. At the beginning of our career, we are pretty comfortable delivering and very few works get postponed. But as we grow in age other important tasks of personal nature like health issues in the family, social commitments, and many unforeseen events make us defer things more. In the process, only the ‘Urgent’ ones get the attention and the ones that are also ‘Important’ gets postponed. And one day the long list of unfinished ‘Important’ things jostles for engagement with the ’Urgent’ things of that moment causing what is called Stress.

Simply put, Stress is our inability to deal with the task which we have committed to do on that day.

And staying under a long period of stress does irreparable damage to one’s mind and body affecting his personal and professional life. A huge industry exists to solve this problem because a large number of people can’t get their acts together to refuse what they can’t deliver what they are expected to by the scheduled days. The sincere types who are aware of their postponement acts suffer the guilt of doing so and start seeing themselves as habitual ‘Procrastinators’ and resign to that nomenclature.

Experts say that there are no Procrastinators but there are many who are in the habit of procrastinating.

What then is the habit of procrastinating?

The anatomy of habit has three basic components. There is a Trigger, there is a Pattern and there is a Reward for doing so. Here the jostling of 'Urgent’ and ‘Important’ fight for space and attention and that results in stress. This stress acts as a trigger for the Reaction. As deferring some of the not-so-urgent tasks gives us temporary relief, it acts as a reward for someone to develop a pattern of such deferment.

We all know how the act of organizing the cupboard, our wardrobe, the file cabinet, or the travel documents for reimbursements gets deferred for months and months and we develop some fear of touching it. But one day it confronts us to be taken up because by then we would have exhausted all our excuses, it adds to the existing stress. Once we give in to the pattern of procrastinating it results in our feeling guilty, which causes panic and makes us take more and newer excuses to procrastinate further.

Many of us helplessly surrender to a downward spiralling loop of stress and guilt unless something throws us out of it. Many people in the creative field suffer from this infamy as more mental focus and discipline are required to deliver creative content as opposed to those who do repetitive and routine work. 

Experts say that nothing can help us come out of this loop unless we help ourselves out of it.

They say that the core of the problem lies in giving in to the stress and reacting to it by deferring the pending tasks and enjoying temporary relief. 

They say that of all the tasks which you are too tempted to defer, at least if one task is accommodated in that days scheduled and pushed to some start; one can complete the task soon if he gets over the fear of restarting it. And completing one such task fuels the confidence to complete all others.

That is the only way to deal with it - to take the bull by its horn.

Kutta-Dutta Rigmarole

Sri Kutta! Does it sound weird?

Yes, that’s how he would have been officially addressed because the spelling of his surname in the official record tells just that - had Sri Srikanti Kutta (Dutta) of Bankura not protested. 

 

Dutta was determined and was made of sterner stuff.

 

After repeatedly failing to move the authorities to make a valid change of the name on his ration card, he chose to stage a protest in the most non-violent and creative way. He took his appeal to the head of the organization for the fourth time and instead of requesting the authorities with folded hands wearing a hangdog look, he yelped and whined like a snarling dog much to the chagrin of the BDO in the full public view. The video became viral on social media. 

 

The visibly upset BDO took up this urgent matter personally. Not reported in the press; the matter must have been sorted out in hours. Our experience says that things get done once you make it too hot for them to sit over it any longer. 

 

This ‘non-important’ matter involving a ‘non-descript’ man became ‘urgent’ not because the officer was appalled on discovering the rot of inefficiency in his office but because he saw the rage and determination of Sri Dutta to take on the system and embarrass all of them publicly. As the adage goes ‘The creaking wheel got the oil’. Just assess the harassment, wastage of time, loss of reputation, and human efforts involving so many people for such a small thing.

 

Why did such a small issue reach this stage? Was it necessary? 

 

Quirky stories like that of Dutta’s keep appearing in the newspapers regularly. News like - Man wins a 25-year-long litigation to recover the two rupees he was charged extra by the TTC. A man letting loose a sack full of snakes in the office of the revenue officer who was not heeding his request. 

 

This news of Mr. Kutta (Dutta by now) might have given us a few mirthful moments on the morning of December 19th, but a much bigger and painful truth hiding behind this incident should not be brushed aside. Why a sense of duty and responsibility are not the tracks on which the administrative juggernaut moves automatically? Things move either out of someone’s goodness, or interest or under pressure. Why? 

 

What are the organizational safeguards against it?

 

That incident is a commentary on how our official machinery works without a built-in responsive redressal system and how a common man is pushed to resort to active or passive violence out of sheer frustration of not being heard or served. 

 

Some react like Mr. Dutta, some exert pressure to make things move, and the wise ones devise ways to manage (sic) the obstacles and get their thing done. But no one talks about what to do to institutionalize responsibility and accountability for performance and prevent the officers in charge to go scot-free of their delinquencies. 

 

We are socially conditioned not to see the elephant in the room. But how long?

 

To explain what I mean let us discuss this Kutta to Dutta resolution episode. Did anyone (The BDO in this case) ask his office the following questions to permanently solve the problem in the system?

 

- Why was his name entered erroneously? 

Was the person recording the names not familiar with the Bengali surnames?

 

- Why were his first three appeals not responded to? 

Who was responsible and what was the valid explanation for not effecting the correction?

 

- What do the rules say about such wilful negligence? 

Does it go to his performance assessment? At what stage does the feedback from the public form a part of his assessment? 

 

If the BDO could resolve the issue in hours what disciplinary action was taken on the people who were plain deaf to the first three requests? What did their departmental inquiry unravel?

 

We all have some experience of dealing with such stone-deaf people for whom your reason, duty, and responsibility are not strong enough to make him lift his pen to a piece of paper to put his signature below a half-page note. He can sit on mountains of unattended files for months and no one has the power to ask him about them. It doesn’t matter how convincing or valid is your request, or how acute your situation is; your fate is determined by the whims and fancies of the person you are dealing with. 

They feel empowered by their power to harass the common man. Harassments like this can turn one murderous if one is passing through personal difficulties.

 

We all know that there exists a world where the words like duty, responsibility, and accountability are nowhere mentioned in one’s job description. KRA and KPI and efficiencies are a strange composition of alphabets. 

 

Not long ago to qualify as a capable householder in a city, you had to have contacts in the Civil Supply Department to get some extra kerosene or sugar beyond your quota, DoT JE to get your telephone line timely repaired, an electricity linesman for ensuring early response to a fuse-off the call, LPG distributor for that out of turn gas connection or a refill, cinema hall manager for blocking tickets of a hit movie. Many hobnobbed with the MPs for an LPG connection, telephone line, and a seat in a Central School. 

 

Things have changed for the better and one can lead a respectable life without having to develop a friendship with such people for ensuring their legitimate rights for basic service delivery. Now only the PhDs in most of the state universities are dependent on such personal contact with your supervisor and his relationship with the clerks, big and small in the department. You earn a degree not on your merit as your right but are rewarded for your good relationship with the powers in the system as gratis. Hope it changes soon.

 

This type of harassment is not limited to state-owned organizations, most of the big organizations are blind to their vendor management practices or after-sales service performance. Try calling a toll-free number of a big bank to block your lost credit card or an IVR system of a big white goods company you are to get certain parts not available at the local dealership dispatched to understand what I mean. 

 

If something has worked so far, you are lucky, if there is a hitch, you are plain unlucky. 

 

Just buying a flight ticket in a deal, having a hotel booking in hand, or buying health insurance online won’t give you the expected service assurance, one as to be prepared for their denials citing various clauses and terms and conditions written in fine print somewhere in their documents and have a plan B for those situations.

 

We know how difficult it is to deal with virtual offices for your insurance claim settlement or get your refund for a canceled flight or hotel booking. I am now in the midst of such a refusal-settlement issue with OYO Rooms where my prepaid room booking was flatly dishonored by their property partner in Delhi. You must have the grit of Mr. Dutta to write reams of emails to get them to work. 

 

But then such determination is not commonly found. And the organizations and their officials know that.

 

In these cases, the owners of the organizations and their representing officials know too well that they can continue to be in business as usual by creating a public perception through advertisements and serving those rare hot dissatisfied voices only to silence them. Changing the system for better service and higher accountability is not needed for business continuity. 

 

Oh, now I am reminded of a chronic problem with my BSNL cell phone connection which I can’t neglect anymore. When my phone is out of the network coverage area, the callers are getting diverted to the number of a certain lady in Basta, Balasore who is treating my callers with the choicest of expletives to vent her frustration. Who likes being inundated with calls trying to speak to someone with an unfamiliar name?

 

To deal with the problem first, I have to draft a long application detailing my problem, then personally go to the right officer sitting in some numbered rooms on the right floor of the right office building, and if I am lucky find him in his seat and in a mood to speak to me, if he believes my story and receives my application then go to him again and again over the next one month to follow up and get it resolved by finally discovering some contact who is at a higher position than this officer through six degrees of separation. This process will take me no less than a month. Am I prepared for the ordeal? 

 

I am not so helpless now as I have a choice.

The choice is either I voluntarily go through the ordeal or apply for number portability through an online portal.

The Silence of the Sounds

Some days back in Bangalore, around midnight I was shaken off my sleep by an ear-piercing unfamiliar sound. It was the typical sound of a piece of a heavy metal hammer hitting another large metal body at rhythmic regularity. Why would someone in a residential colony hit a metal body with another hammer continuously for hours so late at night? I started analyzing what could the situation be and drew a big blank.

I could not associate this sound with the industrial situations I had experienced so far. I remained clueless.

Only the next day morning, I could know that the sound was that of a heavy mechanical pile driver and was coming from the ongoing Metro track construction site nearby. The pile driver sound was new to me earlier and now I can recognize it or its close relatives if I am in a different context. The sound file was appended to my database of observations, memories, and experiences.

Our brains, like a computer, are programmed to take a sensory input (smell, sight, touch, taste, and hearing) and scan it through the stored database as big as the length of our lives to find a match. Our five senses–sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell–seem to operate independently, as five distinct modes of perceiving the world. However, they collaborate closely to enable the mind to better understand its surroundings. The bigger the database because of our varied experiences and the deeper our observations of the subtle sensory inputs, the higher will be the possibilities of finding a perfect match.

We predicted danger, and the good news we were expecting and associated the inputs in combination with many joyous and sad memories of the past.

In the olden days, the wise old men were the predictive and computational assets of their communities. They could predict future rain, drought, disease, or impending dangers by processing their datasets of sensory experiences with a high degree of accuracy. Many of our relatives had that intuitive intelligence and could guess situations. They could guess things like what might have happened and who would have done what without being there. They observed people’s behaviours and understood their intentions well.

Their opinions mattered a lot as they were not far from being correct invariably.

Our grandmothers could know from the sound coming from the kitchen if the cat dropped a utensil from the shelf or pushed a ladle off the cauldron. The watchman’s eyes would pop open the moment the distant sound of a fallen ripe mango or a palm would break his summer afternoon sleep. The tiptoe walk of a lurking jackal would alert the homeowners because he recognizes how it sounds when the jackal walks on dead leaves. Farmers could guess if it would rain or not from the smell and nip in the air.

Men of our generation could recognize the difference between a petrol car and a diesel one from their engine sound. A Boeing and an Airbus when it took off. The birds from their chirps and hoots. Earlier we did much such guesswork by default because our sensory channels were always in a heightened state of alertness. Now our dogs only know if the gate is opened by the one, they know or by an intruder; earlier we could know it. He manages to do it still because we have not given him a smart gadget yet.

Now the role of data acquisition from the surrounding and processing has been handed over to high-capacity computers and smartphones. They are doing it 24x7 without our overt permission. For getting long-range weather forecasts to short-range data like the temperature, possibility of rain, road direction, traffic jam, air quality, visibility, sunrise, sunset, heart rate, and distance covered since morning we must have a smartphone with half a dozen apps, and WiFi coverage. The predictions are getting more pinpointed and more accurate.

This accuracy has lowered the need for humans to sharpen their intuitive and analytical faculties for even predicting a small thing next to them. And those who have it still are considered to have redundant skills. The AI engines are getting smarter while our intuitions are getting duller. The need to be observant of our surroundings by using the fullest capacities of our sensory organs is getting less pressured because of the commonly available gadgets and computational powers.

With the changed lifestyle and obsolescence of so many products and equipment, the sounds associated with them are completely unknown to many of us especially the kids of this generation.

In our generation we stopped hearing the typical ‘Cloup’ sound of falling water droplets from a thatched roof in a puddle long after the raid had stopped, the howls of a pack of jackals in the evening, the noisy orchestra of thousands of crickets behind the dead most silence, midnight hooting of owls, the sound of dead leaves being blown away in a summer breeze. The rhythmic sound of a Dhenki and the sound of the beetle nut being cut into thin slices. Many of us didn’t know how a teleprinter sounded.

Can this generation recognize the sound of a Rotary Dial Telephone, how the typical ‘Chuk-Chuk’ tempo increased in a steam engine, the hum and orchestra of mosquitoes around our ears during a power cut, the typical flapping sound a wet Bata slipper created when we walked, the sound of AIR and DD when they opened transmission, the advertisement jingles, the credit jingles of serials, or the now obsolete Fax or a TCP/IP Dialler modem? So many sounds that were ubiquitous and recognizable have been silenced forever with the evolution of society and changed lifestyles.

Though that is not going to materially affect their life in any form, thanks to the internet and massive-sized digital archives of such obsolete sounds being built somewhere, the current generation for academic purposes at least can access the said sounds.

Our modern conveniences which are our own lifestyle choices are nothing but private bubbles detaching our senses of the surrounding temperature, light, humidity, sound, and sight. Now we have glass panes that fend off light and sound, our indoor air quality and temperature are artificially managed, our car cabins are acoustically studio-grade, and we wear noise-cancelling headphones on the road and do everything possible to stay disconnected from our surroundings and people. What reduces our sensory inputs also dulls our ability to process them. 

Disconnected Privacy is the new lifestyle choice. That lifestyle choice silently has disconnected individuals leaving them in private silos and the emotional disconnect between them is what is called Sounds of Silence.

Garfunkel, introducing the song at a live performance with Simon in Harlem, in June 1966, summed up the iconic song's meaning as "the inability of people to communicate with each other, not particularly intentionally but especially emotionally, so what you see around you are people unable to love each other."

Sounds of Silence in the background of Silenced Sound is what we are currently left to deal with.

Respect – What it means and what we have made of it

A cousin of mine who works in a school for children with special needs was recounting an experience of hers.

A senior retiree who stayed alone in their community with time to spare, came occasionally to that school to help people with their chores. He didn’t mind doing any task – big or small whoever asked for help. He wanted to contribute to the community. He was always punctual, came much earlier to school time; and would invariably park his car at the farthest end of the parking lot.

This habit caught the attention of my cousin who asked him about this quirky habit of parking when there are many vacant slots available closer to the exit. He said, as I come early if I park near the exit, the ones who are unable to reach in time for some reason on that day will be forced to park at the farthest end. That will make them late to work. As I have time in hand, I choose the distant slot and leave the better ones for others. 

His answer stunned her. This is the incident from the US.

We from childhood are conditioned to see people coming early to grab the best seat or slot. This behaviour of grabbing and squeezing past others can be seen everywhere. On the road, while checking into the aircraft, leaving the aircraft after landing, waiting for your turn at the buffet, parking lot. A friend told me that as almost all resources are scarce and many people are competing to access them, and it has been so for centuries, this desperate behaviour to outdo the other has been normalized by society.

I didn’t quite agree with the argument.

I see it not as the outcome of a scarcity of resources but as a general absence of respect for our fellow citizens who are immediately next to us. We are exploitive of others’ hapless situations and look for opportunities to disrespect others.

Taking the example of the senior retiree in that school, he had no economic necessity to do a job, he didn’t associate a task with his position, he did things just because he felt that he needed to give it back to the community, he leaves space in the parking lot for the unknown colleagues who could be running late – knowing very well that he will not be penalized for not doing so or ever going to be appreciated for doing so. He does it because it’s the right thing and a moral thing to do. Period. 

Who inculcated such values in him?

As I fulcrum my argument on the word RESPECT, it made me delve a bit deeper into the exact meaning of the word the connotations in which it is meant to be used, and what we have made of it.

As per the Oxford English Dictionary, RESPECT is a noun that means

[1] a feeling of deep admiration for someone or something elicited by their abilities, qualities, or achievements.

[2] due regard for the feelings, wishes, or rights of others.

Yes, due regard for the feelings, wishes, or rights of others is the topic of our discussion.

In our country to act in a servile or an obsequious way, silently suffering the ill-treatment of the one who is more powerful, not raising your voice of disapproval, not expressing dissent, or not giving a suggestion that is contrary to his wishes of your boss are considered the signs of respect. It is normal for the powerful to keep you waiting without thinking of giving a semblance of an excuse, forget an apology. 

Your loyalty and respectfulness to him are evaluated on your ability to take it without complaint. We are taught to take it even if we don’t like it. It manifests in minor acts of disrespect that are ignored or go unnoticed. Like not responding to the New Year message sent by a person from a lesser hierarchy or seeing through him when you bump into him in a public place.

Interestingly and worryingly the same people who were ill-treated earlier by the more powerful mete out similar behavior when they come across people who are less powerful than them. They have normalized it as the standard behaviour of respectable (powerful) people. It is not likely to end as there is huge competition to be in that league of privileged VIPs and earn a license to be disrespectful. The middle-class dreams are made of this. The one who is less powerful and is forced to take this will take it as this is the prevailing culture. If this continues unquestioned in the end, what we will have is a society of street bullies and disrespectful people in various garbs where even a normal act of kindness or courtesy seems like a sterling example of humanity. That's worrying.

What we need is a competition to be respectful, not powerful.

We all know if we must expect change, we must act it ourselves. But do we? Let’s put ourselves to the test and answer a few questions.

1. After using a public toilet do we leave it clean as a mark of respect to the next user?
2. Do we think of leaving the shopping trolley at its right place after using it at the malls and airports?
3. Do you segregate your domestic waste before handing it over to the municipality guy?
4. Do you drive maintaining a safe distance from the car in front of you? Do you stay in the centre of your own lane? 
5. Do you stop at the intersection even if there is no traffic or cop around?
6. At home, after having food, as a practice, do we carry our plates to the sink and dispose of the leftovers properly and stack the crockery after giving it a rinse as a mark of respect to the feeling of the maid who would clean it later?
7. In the restaurant do we consciously speak in a lower voice, not ill-treat the waiter and push back the chair to the original position as a mark of respect to the ones who are here to enjoy a meal and spend time with their friends and family?
8. Do we give a weekly off to our maids and drivers as their right? Or at least feel guilty about it if we don’t?
9. Do we make the driver wait in the dark and humid basement parking while we enjoy the late-night show with our families?
10. Do you feel superior because of your caste, job, education, money, or position?

This is a test of how you treat your fellow citizens without any bias toward their superiority or inferiority for their feelings, wishes, and rights and the law of the land and the environment around you. It is a test as to whether you as a human can lead a responsible autonomous life and not be a burden on the community.

It is not illegal, and no one can hold anything against you if you have scored nought in the above test. But why we must score high is out of the goodness of our hearts. We all should recognize that respecting other feelings, wishes, or rights is just not the correct but moral thing to do.

If you believe in the karmic cycle, remember, what goes around comes around. It's a matter of time before you fall victim to the same disrespect that you have passed on. Respect is what a reasonably-minded person would do, and such people collectively build a beautiful compassionate society where the weakest feel secure not threatened in the presence of the powerful.