Courage? Or cowardice?

As an émigré into Bangalore, you are advised that the city works on the creed “Adjust Madi” : please adjust. You will, it suggests, face various inconveniences from time to time. It is best in all such situations to make allowances for them and move on. Resistance, as the Borg Queen famously put it in Star Trek, is futile. Of course, while Bangalore actually acknowledges it, is this not true for all of us all over India?

You are denied your space to cross at a designated zebra crossing. You adjust. A chap in the car in front of you opens the door only to explosively discharge a litre of glutinous red tobacco spittle. You adjust. A man, claiming that he is in a hurry, jumps into the queue ahead of you at a Railway Booking Counter. You adjust. The municipal authority digs up every square inch of motorable road and walkable footpath in your city. You adjust. Neighbours in the adjoining bungalow use a high power hose connected directly to the main water supply conduit to wash their car. And the driveway. You adjust.

We all adjust. And move on. After some time, even the bile stops to rise. After all, we are like that only. No?

It is India’s historic genius to be the ultimate assimilative civilization. For countless centuries invading hordes entered this country to plunder her riches and carry them back home. Most times, they never went back. Everybody adjusted and before long, disappeared into the rich broth called India. A new gene pool was added to the melting pot and everyone was the better off for it.

Are these two phenomena equivalent? Do they merely represent aspects of an underlying willingness, even eagerness, to accommodate?

Great civilisations share a common desire to define and codify rules of conduct. The finest go further and identify the ethical principles that underlie such rules. Whether Hammurabi of Babylon or Moses of Canaan, our ancient priest king Manu or Quetzalcoatl of the Aztec pantheon, they all became known as lawgivers, arbiters of right and wrong for their societies. Without exception, all of them demanded that their followers be steadfast in upholding the right, even at cost to their own life and limb. Krishna’s revelation of the Gita to Arjun at the battlefield of Kurukshetra is, above all else, a stirring exhortation to uphold Dharma, the righteous way. Indeed, righteousness held a lofty place among the virtues.

When India assimilated, the new incumbents accepted the norms and mores of their host society. Often, they enhanced it. Remember the story of the Zoroastrians who landed at Sanjan in Gujarat, about a thousand years back, telling the King Jadav Rana that they would be as sugar to the milk that was the kingdom? Or the Sufic spiritual legacy India received from Persian and Arab mystics who made this country their ‘Karmabhoomi’? Assimilation, unlike ‘adjustment’ is certainly not passivity.

Right then, let us return briefly to examples of ‘adjust madi’ that we reviewed a few paras back. Could you have told the drivers of the vehicles sitting astride the pedestrian crossing that they had violated the stop line and were committing a brazen traffic offence? Could you have written to the Municipal Commissioner seeking explanation of the craters that we pass for roads and footpaths? Could you have rung your neighbour’s bell and asked him to stop such criminal waste of water?
You could have, but you didn’t. You adjusted, walked on and soon enough, forgot all about it.

There was nothing virtuous about this indifference. You were scarcely beyond the occasional misdemeanour yourself. You tossed empty brown paper bags out of your own car window. You regularly drove the wrong way up a one way; after all it was an extra 1 km if you followed all the no entry signs. Your DDA flat now had an extra room after you covered over the balcony and settled the issue amicably with the local building inspector. When you were at the receiving end of the indignities that these everyday adjustments engendered, you almost saw yourself as virtuous, for having the stoicism to deal with them without demur.

Don’t kid yourself. That wasn’t stoicism, or any virtue of any sort. It was an acknowledgement of your own complicity. And assuming that you were one of the vanishing few whose escutcheon remains untarnished, your apathy was merely a sign of cowardice, not courage under fire. Most times of course it was the devastating combination of both; you were a complicit coward.

Civilisational transformation is, in Malcolm Gladwell’s terminology, a tipping point phenomenon. A lot of small and individually ineffectual changes need to accumulate across millions of people and situations for the change to take effect and transform a civilisation. This change cannot be legislated. When you walk about in the great cities of the East or West, the litter free pavements, well maintained public utilities and encroachment free parks and gardens don’t speak only of strict policing and efficient municipal administration. They speak, in at least equal measure, of a community conscious of, and actively practicing, its civic responsibilities.

Several studies show that this pays real economic dividends. When people believe that other people in their community will act within a prescribed set of norms, they create a trust engine that becomes a huge force multiplier for the entire society. Canada is a great beneficiary of this, as are the Scandinavian countries.

Isn’t it possible for us to see that the ‘adjust’ we do now is unjust?

If you must adjust, do it in a manner that will lead to more, not less civic behaviour.