WHY IS BIG BAD?

Reading Indian newspapers can be quite stressful for me.  It’s not just because of the general ongoing gloom regarding corruption and the economy that’s tearing this country apart but If you live in India and read your preferred newspaper every morning, the pathetically shocking quality of writing and reporting will kill whatever hope you’re holding out for the next page and the next. It has always amazed me how reports on accidents involving two vehicles are so one sided in India. The job of journalists or reporters is to report an incident and not have an opinion. But I am shocked at the level of unprofessional reporting in this country. In no other country that I have visited or lived in have I ever read a piece of news about vehicular accidents where the larger vehicle is pronounced culprit even without factual determination of how the accident occurred or who could have been responsible. I have almost never read the use of the word “allegedly” while referring to the larger vehicle involved in an accident.  Journalists are influencers, opinion makers who can direct public curiosity towards any direction they want, whether it is anger or disdain or unrest. Incendiary reporting in our times has led to communal flare ups, riots and even fatwas. How is it, that while reporting an accident, anyone can decide who the culprit is? If you see a motorcycle or a two wheeler under the wheels of a car, should you deduce automatically or be led to deduce that the car driver is at fault? If you find the same car and driver under the wheels of a truck, would you then automatically deduce that the truck driver is at fault? The answer should be No. Ascertaining the cause of a road accident is a mature science of deduction that is put into practice by many traffic authorities and insurers across the world.  You will never find a news piece about an accident in the US that will read ‘Truck driver mows down 5” (unless the powers that be have determined beyond a doubt that the driver was drunk or purposely wanted to cause harm). You are more likely to read, “Fatal accident – 5 dead”. The article will then tell you where the accident took place, what the bystanders saw and what seems to be the likely cause of the accident. The journalist will not attempt to be judge and jury on such a news item because there is a critical mass of understanding that pronouncing someone guilty before they have been investigated by experts could destroy the livelihood, the credibility and the family of a wrongfully accused person.

In India, we have no such problem. If you’ve ever been in an accident with a vehicle smaller than yours, you would have had to face immediate hostility from onlookers. People will pour in from all corners leaving their work to see a fight or a bloodied scene. Motorists will stop to observe and opine, thereby blocking traffic and creating a traffic jam. Police will be the last to arrive on the scene.  If you are the smaller vehicle owner, you will almost immediately sense that the mood is in your favor and against the owner of the larger vehicle and, may I add, also against the police. This is likely to give you a sense of confidence and a fighting ability to claim damages, accuse your co-sufferer and vehemently deny any wrong doing, even if you clearly know that you were at fault. If you happen to be the owner of the larger vehicle, you will immediately sense preferential treatment by the police as they try and bargain with you for letting you off quietly. You could spend the rest of your life shouting yourself hoarse that in-fact, it was clearly the fault of the smaller vehicle driver as he swerved at 90 kmph from a feeder lane onto the ring road when what he should have done is to slow down in the face of merging traffic! No one will give a damn about your logic. In-fact, logic will be damned and so will you!  

Driving irresponsibly is not confined to the rich or to those who appear richer on that particular day of the accident.  In a country of 1.2 billion people, would it be possible to conclude that everyone who has a two wheeler or a bicycle or even pedestrians  are highly responsible drivers and people in general,  who follow traffic rules completely? Then why is it that only the owners of the bigger vehicle on the day get pilloried? Do bigger vehicles have the potential of causing bigger damage? The answer is Yes.  Is every driver of the bigger vehicle on that day a culprit? The answer is No. What prevents pedestrians from taking foot over bridges and instead crossing a busy road by jumping over medians and doing a death of dance?  I have seen people, families with little children, trying to cross MG Road around the MG Road station when the foot over bridge of the Metro station is staring them in the face. Most urban Indians are unhealthy and a good climb up a flight of stairs could constitute wonderful cardiovascular exercise.  It is shocking that they are unwilling to take the flight of stairs or in this case an automatically operating escalator to go up the bridge! All they have to do is climb down manually from the other side and the road is crossed. Instead, they do a dance in the face of oncoming and aggressive traffic with husbands, wives and infants in tow!  On days when I observe this behavior, I think we are truly a nation of the lazy! So if I try to cross the road in the face of speeding cars by waving my hand and urging motorists to stop suddenly and should I get hurt in the process, should I really be blaming the motorist?

I have read news reports of children being mowed down by speeding cars.  Having a child suffer any bodily harm, to me, is the most base and gut wrenching thing in the world. Children expect us to protect them from harm. But how many times have you seen a parent or a guardian walk their ward on the traffic side of the road while themselves walking on the kerbside? I have never understood this phenomenon.  If there is a road where traffic is moving along and there is a kerbside where people are expected to walk, would you put a vulnerable child on the traffic side or the kerbside? This is not a trick question and neither is it rocket science!  The answer is that if possible, both the parent and child should walk on a footpath and when that is not possible, the child should be placed kerbside while the parent takes the traffic side. A normal adult has a better chance at surviving a collision with a vehicle while walking traffic side than a child. What part of this requires special processing by an adult brain? Children are unpredictable. They could be walking quietly one minute and the next they could want to run and hop or chase. Imagine if you are driving along, going on your way, minding your own business and suddenly a child decides to break free from the hands of their parents to make a run for the road, what chance do you have of saving the child from a collision with your car? And if you do somehow manage, imagine what else you could be hitting against or what other vehicle could hit into you due to a sudden swerving action that you’ve been forced to take in order to protect the child. Under these circumstances, if you happen to be in the biggest vehicle in that scenario, you would get beaten up, threatened or heckled or all three. You could cry till the end of your days that the culprit, in fact was the child or more importantly the parent of the child but you would never get a fair hearing from anyone. If you somehow manage to prove in a court of law that you are in fact the aggrieved party and not the aggressor, it would be assumed instantly that you being rich (or richer by comparison) is the real cause of your being let off. Not only are we a nation of the lazy, we are also a nation of the biased and presumptuous!

The one piece of reporting that really makes me want to claw my eyes out is that of railway accidents. While large scale rail accidents are common in India and we have somehow started living with them without holding anyone accountable, it is the smaller accidents that get reported which make me wonder about the intelligence of our reporters. When you read things like speeding train crushes car on unmanned railway crossing, you have got to ask yourself what that car was doing on that crossing. It is not as if trains, which we all know run on predetermined tracks, are able to speed willfully along the country side mowing down people. Why do people risk crossing railway tracks not knowing when trains will cross or worse seeing an approaching train and still making a dash for it? Why is there no fear or caution? Why is life so cheap and chances so many?  When such accidents happen, why then do newspapers carry reports suggesting that the train was somehow responsible for such accidents?  The train has got to be the biggest vehicle of that accident scene and so, is automatically held responsible for causing the accident and any ensuing death and destruction.  I have myself seen two wheeler drivers duck under railway crossing barricades, with families in tow, making a dash across the railway tracks just to save a few minutes. The big question is, how will this sense of urgency help them if they are dead? More importantly, if they survive, which they usually do and hence get used to taking such chances, what will their children learn? They will learn that it is OK to stick a finger in the eye of common sense and the bigger guy is always responsible for their accidents even if they themselves were the cause of it. 

Most importantly, reporting that is potentially malevolent, egregious and imbalanced should come under the purview of a culpable punishment. It is not right to cast aspersions but it is even worse to declare someone an offender when clearly, there is no way to ascertain that fact.  Justice Markandeya Katju, the chairperson of the Press Club of India was on to something when he lashed out against Indian journalists. In his words -”The way much of the media has been behaving is often irresponsible, reckless and callous. Yellow journalism, cheap sensationalism, highlighting frivolous issues (like lives of film stars and cricketers) and superstitions and damaging people and reputations, while neglecting or underplaying serious socio-economic issues like massive poverty, unemployment, malnourishment, farmers' suicides, health care, education, dowry deaths, female foeticide, etc., are hallmarks of much of the media today”. We need to educate people that irresponsible behavior is not prevalent only in the rich. It is a nation- wide malaise that can be uprooted by continuous practice of responsible behavior that can surely be augmented by responsible reporting and factual representation of incidents and issues.