Human callousness: we need to mend our ways

Human callousness: we need to mend our ways
Vaatupura A. Jayaprakash

We all naturally claim to be beings of good reason and most of our actions are supposed to be either governed or dictated by reason or in common parlance, common sense. But it is true in most of the cases too. But if we look around, we will be able to see innumerable actions we meticulously carry out thinking that they are ineffectual and the same are not going to have any impact on others. And there are occasions in our life where we feel complacent and conclude that it is OK to be not OK, and we go o0n doing things that are not at all alright or acceptable to others. Yes, it is very difficult to do all things confirming to the expectations of others. Let us see a few activities that, in my opinion, are nothing short of chronic callousness.

· A small gutter that gets formed in front of our painted compound wall is a threat to the wall. So we callously place a huge boulder on the gutter so that the automobiles would not splash water on your wall. How many of us take time off to fill that gutter properly? Do we ever think that an unsuspecting road user is likely to lose his life thanks to this indigenous ‘road rule’? Do you not think it is callousness?
· You are held up in a traffic jam. You have the clear idea that you cannot move your vehicle unless the one in front of you moves. Still you honk your horn continuously as if the person in front of you is the reason for the block. And if possible we will nose up our vehicle to the down line and try to overpass all the held up vehicles making the whole process an unmanageable mess. We do it.
· If you are on a two-wheeler, you have no road rules. If traffic is blocked, you will take the front wheel of your two-wheeler through any narrow divide that you find in between any two vehicles ahead. The picture is clear; you have done your little share to the mess.
· Let’s come back to our homes. Imagine that you unload a tipper full of sand in front of your house, right on the public road. Instead of removing the sand dune as early as possible, we keep it protected from being washed off by barricading it with either hollow bricks or the ball like boulders that we unload for construction. They will be there prepared to fell any road user or motorist or flatten tires of any make. Do we not do it? And if the unloaded boulders and sand happen to be a little more than what is needed, we simply abandon the remaining on the road itself, as if they had been there for ages.
· You are engaged in a cleaning spree, your room, back yard and surroundings. The spree leaves you with a heap of waste degradable, non-degradable, inflammable and bursting-if-heated things. What would you do with that? We simply abandon it on the roadside. Or we pack them in a gunny bag and along with the kitchen waste, we take it to a ‘no man’s land, some public place where we not find any public. This nasty waste management is prime sign of human callousness.
· Take this example. You are in a queue. You know you are supposed to follow the person right in front of you. How many times you wouldn’t lean or leap over the shoulders of the person in front of you? You know he cannot help you. You know this behaviour of yours does not help him either to speed up the process.
· Walking up two floors takes a few seconds. And it is good to avoiding lifts and elevators for your physique. But we find it alright to wait for minutes to get the lift to the third, second and even first floor.
· Shell we take a look at the way when we walk on the road? Roads are meant for pedestrians. It was true. But today, roads are meant for automobiles too. You blow your horn one or two times when you see a buffalo on the road, it will give you way. On the other hand, you sound your horn a hundred times seeing a man on the move; sorry you have to manage your way ahead on your own.
· You may have seen mothers taking their kids for a walk or letting the baby walk. Most probably these mothers let the baby walk on the tar and the mother would walk through the roadside. The kid with spring like behaviour is a potential threat to any road user. They skip or slip off their parent’s hands and fall prey to speeding vehicles. Have you not seen this callousness of mothers?
· Haven’t you seen cyclists taking the right side? Two wheelers overtake on the left. Auto-rickshaws plying crammed with scores of kids and their bulging school bags suspended all over the upholstery? And tell me what haven’t you seen? Still, do you not do it at times?

The above said are a few of our civilized callousness. Using mobiles while driving and riding two wheelers, indiscriminately eating things that kill us, making the world much more noisy instead of making it peaceful when you find some happiness in your life. Shouting, whistling, hauling, bursting crackers and so goes that list. Racing two wheelers much faster than the machine can do and ramming against speeding trucks, alter that two wheeler with all the noise making devices to make the people in the vicinity suffer from heart attacks, channeling our effluents and green water to the surroundings thereby threatening the neighbours and the society with communicable and water bourn diseases; and the list is endless.

We all need to be thinking minimum two times before we do any one of the above-mentioned callousness which we do presuming that they are not harmful, but they actually are. Because these behaviours have claimed many lives, made many crippled and a lot more better-dead-than-living. Shall we make amends in the ways we behave? For good of course.