Inconsideration

All of us express unhappiness over poor customer service and littering. Sometimes, remedial suggestions are proposed, and even implemented, but some time later, nothing much will seem to have changed.

Despite the government's initiatives for clean and green clean cities, which is limited to public hoarding which exhort the virtues, it's quite obvious to anybody who has spent time looking at real behaviour, that Indians litter all the time. There are cigarette butts and trash everywhere. We push household rubbish out to the common corridors and lift landings.

A few months ago, I was walking towards a building with 2 levels of shops, on the ground floor and the floor above, with the upper shops fronting a common balcony-walkway.

By chance I noticed a group of people walking on the balcony, just a second before one of the men finished his cigarette, flicking what remained of it over the parapet. He didn't look before he tossed it out. The still-lit cigarette landed on the head of a 5- or 6-year-old girl with frizzy, bulked-up hair, so rather than bounce off, the cigarette nestled into it. She didn't seem to have noticed it at first -– and her lack of reaction led me to think the cigarette landed safely away from her -- but when her hair was on fire, she and her mother most certainly did. By that time, the men on the balcony had disappeared. To this day, they are probably oblivious to what they had done.

I went to a popular store in an equally popular shopping mall. As I pulled open the glass door with my right hand to enter, a woman cut into my path from my left to step in before me. I had to hold the door open for her. However, instead of moving into the shop, she stopped at the doorway to remind the shop assistant of something. From the conversation, I could make out that this woman also worked in the same shop The shop assistant was some 3 metres away, and so the woman could well have, indeed should have, moved closer in, so that she wouldn't need to speak as loudly as she did. But speak loudly she did, from the doorway, while blocked by her, I had to keep holding the door open, waiting for her to finish. When she was done, she turned around and scraped past me on her way out, as if I didn't exist.

Inside, I asked the shop assistant, "Do you have glue?"

"Ya," she said, without looking up from shaping her nails while chatting on her mobile nestled between her shoulder and her head.

"Where would I find it?" I asked.

"Over there," she said with a perfunctory wave of her hand. "Don't bother me," she must have wanted to say.

I dutifully went over to the corner that I figured she had indicated, but of course, couldn't see any glue there.

"Look systematically," I told myself, but as I travelled my eye along the messy shelves, I became vaguely aware of another shop assistant watching me from behind. She made no offer to help; she was making sure that I was not shoplifting.

I am sure any Indian reading this would consider my experience anything but typical.

A while ago, I remember reading an article in a magazine, which reported that they had conducted a "poll of 500 Indians aged 18 to 80 in a shopping mall" which "revealed surprising attitudes" on the subject of littering. Quite frankly, I was not surprised.

A majority of the people polled said they did not feel any need to pick up after themselves, with 21 shamelessly admitting it might be 'too inconvenient' or that they were just 'too lazy'. Another 19 expected someone else to pick up after them; others blamed a lack of rubbish bins.

The article quoted a 19-year-old student saying: "If I leave small things like tissue on the table, I don't consider it littering because cleaners will clear it anyway." And another 20-year-old said: "I litter because there are not many rubbish bins around. Besides, the cleaners pick up the trash most of the time. I do not think it is all right to litter, but sometimes I am just too tired and lazy."

There is no gender bias here. Said a 19 year old girl, a student of a local college: "I care very little about the environment, I never think of it. I am aware that what I do affects the environment, but I don't think of it when I litter."

Do adults know any better? No. The magazine also had a quote from a vendor in his 40s: "Usually I throw litter on the ground. I can be lazy like that but I think that works fine, I afterall pay Hafta regularly."

Year in year out, no one can think of any solution. We just resort to blaming the Government to enforce laws, though we all know that is not going to happen. The same with poor customer service. We're still stuck on the mindset of running Courtesy campaigns, which is really little more than exhortation with a dash of public-service advertisements.

It's not that we never see good service in India. At some establishments, like the 5-star hotels, from what I've noticed, I think Indian staff are comparable to many other countries.

At an electronics store a few months ago, I wanted to buy a particular model of lens for my camera, but they had just run out of stock. The salesman however, asked me to wait while he telephoned other branches of the chain to locate one for me. He spent some 20 minutes doing that (because at each outlet, they had to check the inventory), even though, at the end of the day, I don't think any sales commission would be credited to him, since I'd be buying it from another branch. I thanked him, but regretfully didn't think to note his name.

However, I sometimes wonder whether, once outside their structured environments, where no management has taught them how to anticipate and provide for clients' needs, where in fact there is no hierarchy of service provider and client, the same Indians will litter, spit, brush past people and rush in through train doors.

Here is what happened, when I went into a leading Mobile service provider's office to get a replacement SIM card. I first wait at the help desk, where 2 men are busy talking to each other. After a couple of "Excuse me"s, the second one far more louder than the first, they notice me and direct me to a counter. The lady in that counter hands me a form with instructions to fill it up and come back with a copy of proof of ID. No, they do not have a copier. I will have to go out and get a copy made.

When I return, she verifies my details and directs me to another counter, where I am supposed to pay for the replacement and then come back to her. Which I do and then she enters few details in her computer and says "It is done. You SIM will be activated in 1 hour". Wow. The process took me 1 hour 30 minutes. But, should it really require 4 people and 90 minutes for this process? 

It doesn't need much insight to see that littering, antisocial behaviour and poor service standards have related causes: people don't care enough about other people and the environment around them. There's a distinct lack of empathy for others or concern for common property and spaces. The times when we see Indians giving a good account of themselves, it's mostly when they're doing their job, which is the result of training and management insistence, as well as due to their self-interest. Once we lift these factors the real ugliness is revealed.

Likewise, when enforcement action is taken to demand respect for our numerous laws, people behave, but other times, they slip back into their old ways. For example, we've extended our smoking ban to food centres and bus-stops, but not a day passes when I do not see someone flouting it. They don't even try to hide what they are doing anymore. Like me, they probably have not seen any enforcement action either. Then we go ahead and blame others. I am sure most of us have heard some thing similar to this - "I was cruising along at just 100 kmph and that stupid cyclist suddenly cut across". The unstated fact here is that it is a 60 kmph speed limit zone.

And still we exhort, and think that exhortation is enough.

Clearly this problem is very deep-rooted, and no one, not me certainly, really knows its roots and its solutions. But after 62 years of independence, what is most striking is that no serious attempt is made to enquire more deeply. We'll never solve the problem unless we know why things are the way they are. An in-depth sociological study is obviously needed, yet it seems to me that we're almost afraid to ask.

What demons lurk within India that produces such ugly citizens?

Let me speculate with three:

1. We have internalised a feeling that it is beneath our dignity to pick up after ourselves, or be of service to others. And why would that be? Possibly, the average Indian is subconsciously reacting to the daily slights he gets from the elitist, snobbish upper strata of Indian society, making it necessary for him to maintain a certain (false) pride. If the rulers treat me like dirt, then at least I should be able to treat the sanitation workers like dirt too. I have a right to litter!

2. Perhaps the emphasis on being competitive, coupled with constant reminders of scarce resources and external threat has produced a kind of citizen that prioritises a selfish looking out for himself, over caring for others. Is the competitive spirit, so necessary for economic survival incompatible with a more gracious society? If we had to choose, which would we choose?

3. Why do people have no sense of ownership either of the common space, or of the society in which we live -- which sense of ownership engenders courtesy and consideration for others in the same community?

The idea that ownership leads naturally to a person taking care of an object, space or process is commonsense. One would have to be blind not to see this. Indians do take good care of their flats, possessions, cars. But they dump rubbish a mere 5 metres outside their front door, or toss empty water bottles out the window on highways indicating clearly that they have no sense of ownership beyond what they own. It is a common sight to see people litter Railway carriages with peanut shells. How many would do the same at home?

Perhaps a polity that includes a government that likes to use laws and penalties to give direction to people invariably disconnects the citizen from his community. It is a known fact that the more the citizen finds himself having to direct his attention to the government's demands, the more his lateral relationships with fellow citizens wither. A sense of community cannot thrive when the government tends to monopolise all initiative. It may be that increasingly Indians have come to see India as the property of the government, not their shared inheritance.

Together with the feeling that the government is not theirs anyway – there is the well-known pessimism about ever being able to influence or even engage meaningfully with it – the average Indian ends up with no sense of ownership over "the government's property", and no concern about other people. We are all automatons anyway. 

In other words, are littering and rudeness symptoms of how our politics has shaped our society? Would sociological research to uncover the causes for our behaviour end up asking too many "sensitive" questions?

Well, maybe we should play safe and stick to exhortation for the next 38 years and then go ahead and have grand celebrations for 100 years of freedom. I shudder to think of the litter those celebrations will leave behind.

Signing off....

Rajan