‘Five women, a four-year-old boy and a man were killed and eight others, including five children, seriously injured when the bus ran over them as they were crossing the Delhi-Agra road at Ali village in south Delhi.’
‘What’s new?’ I hear you ask and I completely agree with you.
For a country and people who tend to boast of a great and glorious culture, in reality we don’t give a damn about fellow humans, other life forms, values and rules.
What else can explain the fact that India ranks highest in traffic related fatalities among all the countries in the world! A WHO graph of 1998 shows India accounted for 216,859 of the combined figure of 1,170,694 fatalities. A whopping 18%.
In comparison, Japan recorded 9211 deaths in 1998 – 0.78 %.
Why is it that the average person in India who cares for his family at home and comes across as a loving devoted husband, a caring son to his aged parents and a doting father to his children, doesn’t even slow down when he sees an elderly person crossing the road.
Instead he blares his horn and glares angrily, assuming that they should know better than to cross the road when vehicles are moving.
While driving courtesy is non-existent in India, in Japan it is legendary. Could this be a reason for the comparative low fatalities in Japan?
Could it be because we have so many cross cultures, so many invasions through out history that our ‘courtesy gene’ has been blunted or mutated that we don’t consider a person outside our circle as a human enough?
Or could it be that the great and glorious Indian culture that we read so much about is just a myth?