Thursday 23 February 2012

Ask not what your country can do for you....


                                  It was 8.30 pm and i was heading home from my office, when the wireless set in my car started calling for me saying that there has been an accident of a child and there is a grave law and order problem developing with people of the locality out on streets in large numbers arsoning and pelting stones,and as a result jamming the highway. I too asked station officers of the nearby police stations to rush to the spot with force. It took  me around twenty five minutes to reach the spot. There were around twenty policemen including me at the spot and there was an agitating crowd of around 300 people with stones jamming the road with burning tyres and trying to burn the truck which was involved in the accident. I got down from my vehicle with my body protector on, a polycarbonate shield and a polycarbonate lathi in my hand. The duty was to protect the life and property, the job at hand was to save the truck from arson, protect the life of the truck driver and to remove the dead body of the child from the road and send it for postmortem  and also disperse the crowd so that traffic could resume. It was a indeed a very bad accident where the body was completely mangled with all the organs strewn on the road and any person other than  a doctor or a policeman was bound to have lost it for a moment.

                              Not something unusual for us, we have got used to the ‘petty local leaders’., ‘social workers’, who take up the cause of accident victims every other day and on the pretext keep the dead body on the road and jam it to get their share of cheap popularity. Nobody ever asked them as to what they achieved by this ,other than causing inconvenience to people who are stuck in the jam and showing utmost disrespect to the dead body by putting it in the middle of the road and doing politics over it. Anyways the situation was brought under control as we tried to reason with people there. We tried to convince them to register a case, we caught the driver who was hiding from the crowd and brought him safely to the police station.....and who would have been killed or at least beaten up very badly had the crowd found him before the police did. We enquired the people there about the child and about his parents.

                                  We needed the guardian to register an FIR of the accident and also so that further formalities of the inquest report and the postmortem could be carried out and road opened for the traffic, the agitated crowd decided not to cooperate and started accusing us of being insensitive, refusing to tell who were the child’s parents…….. they all started claiming that the child belonged to all of them  and that all of them were his parents. This went on for a while and we kept on arguing with them and tried to make them see reason in whatever way we could. We told them that there could be an ambulance stuck in the jam and that some children might be going home from tutions....anything that would defuse the situation. On the other hand I kept getting calls from the people stuck in the traffic jam saying that the police was useless and it has not been able to resume traffic even after two hours and that the police doesn't do anything except for taking bribes and harassing people.

                               Well all things come to an end and so did this..... we got them around and had to now send the body for the postmortem..... one of the constables started to pick up the body parts and put them in a sack and asked for people to help picking up those parts which were strewn all over the road alongwith blood and flesh.And all those men who were claiming the boy who died to be theirs a few minutes ago, backed out and spread out twenty feet backwards . We picked up the body, sent it for postmortem and put sand over the bloodspots and resumed the traffic and I came back home wondering  ....

The steel frame



                                             As I switched on the TV , there was a lot of hue and cry about an IPS officer making a constable do a front roll for some indiscipline on the part of the constable. There were as many as six people on the screen giving their opinions about what they thought was an absolutely unacceptable act in a liberal democracy like ours. Those armchair social workers and socialites suddenly acquired the right to give tips on how should an Addl.DCP be doing his job!!!   In the disciplined forces, corporal punishments are not taboo and are part of regular training and punishments. Anyone who has watched any of the movies related to armed forces or the police forces would know it.     Many a comments on various fora suggested that the IPS officers are cruel, must be suspended for meting out  such a punishment, must be made to apologize etc,etc…. realizing little that, if the same constable had shown impolite behaviour at a traffic signal to them they would want him to be hanged. The constable was supposed to have carried out his duties in a certain manner and it is through a system of rewards and punishments that a supervisory officer makes sure that everyone does his duty in an alert and disciplined manner. Such a reaction from people discourages young, bright and outstanding officers and they are often held to ransom by such sensationalizing media with little knowledge and  mindlessly supported by another bunch of mal-educated and internet savvy jokers who have an opinion on each and everything without having any knowledge or conscience

                         There was another incident of a particular  lady IPS officer slapping a lady protestor who was partcipating in a protest and  jamming the road. many many learned men and women of fragile intellect commented on you tube questioning the system of reservation, attributing the act of the lady officer to her ''low'' origins, some using the filthiest of hindi abuses against the officer.

                            I am not commenting  on whether the act of the officer was right or wrong , what i am pained to see is the mental bankruptcy of this new, internet savvy so called educated generation which is as ugly and rotten as the yellow journalists i had mentioned in my earlier blog……. Those who can name Britney Spear’s personal trainer but will not be able to recall the name of the Vice president of our country and those who don’t know about Dhyanchand but know how many months pregnant Angeline Jolie is!!!!! And they think its their right to comment on someone’s caste and on reservation , even when they know nothing about the  constitution which provides for it. They do know they have the freedom of expression under the same constitution and also have found out the caste of the of the lady officer, but do they know the same constitution has a chapter on the fundamental duties as well and do they know the caste of the Chairman of the Drafting Committee of the constitution. This shallow insistence on one’s rights without any deliberation on what one’s duties and responsibilities are, can we see where we are heading........????

                                  Reservation or no reservation, the members of the All India Services are those who chose to go to godforsaken parts of our country and serve the people there. If they could qualify this examination they could very well qualify many others with better salaries. Many who never ever lived anywhere other than posh localities in class 'A' cities, all their lives and could have been placed in the best of multinational companies with ten times their current salaries ,are serving in naxal affected districts with an imminent threat to their families' and their lives, many serve in places where there is no internet, hotel or even a restaurant to speak of. The intellectual abilities of their members is far better than most who sit on their computers every afternoon to comment for the heck of it ( or they think its cool) on people they hardly know,  with moral and social values  they can hardly comprehend.

                                        I strongly believe that it is because an all India service officer leaves his state and goes out to work in another state of the country , learns the language of the state and works there for 30-35 years of his life, that the democracy is working so well in this country and its integrity has been preserved unlike some of our neighbouring nations. I do agree that there are black sheeps everywhere but the bureaucracy of india under the given circumstances by which I mean the leaders ,the citizenry we are meant to serve, and the moral degeneration of the society in general .I think it is doing a pretty decent job out of it……