Let the plane fly itself (or not) while we slug it out

We’ve heard it all now, really. The pilots of a Sharjah-Delhi flight got into a major scuffle with two other crew members. A full-fledged punch-up. What were these people thinking, when they brawled in front of passengers, endangering everyone and making thorough idiots of themselves? What were they thinking? If reports are to be believed, incredibly, the spark was something about who didn’t wish who ‘properly’. Oh lord, save us from this lethal Indian combination: we are pompous and reckless.
We’ve seen it on our roads of course – that dirty dance of the pompous and the reckless. Now, come, see it playing itself out in the air. Pay fancy air-fares to be taken on a flight that drifts along, while the vahan-chalaks slug it out.
Nothing really new about it. Being so completely into yourself that you don’t care about what happens to anyone besides you is quite the standard ‘shining’ urban Indian thing to do. It’s evident in the way we talk, we walk, we drive, we eat, we spit, we hoard when there is any kind of shortage...it’s all about me, myself, and at the most my munni and my pappu. The rest of the world can go fly a kite. There is never, in most of us, a sense of being part of a larger, responsible set of people, citizenry. Most importantly, there are no Consequences. How can there be any awareness of consequences if all I need to do is look out for myself, and all I need to do if I endanger someone else’s well-being, is bribe the right person?
And so we are free to, like very little children, never defer or postpone our own needs, or contain our frustration, for the larger good. And hence, it has now come to this, that even men in charge of an entire aircraft up in the air, have to settle some stupid scores right there and then, and passenger safety be damned. And decorum? What’s that? Sorry, not in our dictionary. Used to be, but we deleted it as a useless word with no takers.
Safety, in our minds, is for some lily-livered, fussy people. Possibly for the old and feeble. Not for able-bodied thriving Indians elbowing each other out of the way to get exactly where they want and what they want. That’s why we have stampedes, and ferry tragedies and a hundred other grotesque ‘accidents’ every year with unfailing regularity. Because no one is overly impressed by the words safety, caution, precaution.
In fact, why call these tragic events accidents, at all, really. These are all a result of consciously and blatantly flouting rules, again and again, with complete impunity. I looked up the word ‘accident’ in various dictionaries, real and virtual, and none of the definitions fit the various disasters that we routinely manufacture, with our public behaviour. One dictionary tells us, that an accident is an unfortunate mishap; especially one causing damage or injury. Another one says that an accident is anything that happens suddenly or by chance without an apparent cause. Somewhere else I read that an accident is an unexpected, unusual and unintended external action; an undesigned, sudden, and unexpected event.
Now let’s see how most of our ‘accidents’ cannot, by this description, be called accidents at all. Tell me, how is cramming people into a ferry way beyond its capacity, an ‘undesigned’ event? How is not having life-saving equipment on that ferry and so drowning your passengers, a ‘sudden action without an apparent cause’? How is having a slug-fest and manhandling a woman colleague while you’re supposed to be flying the damned plane an ‘unintended’ action?
Sure, we can hold seminars and jet around the world to talk about loss prevention, trauma-free cities, secure borders, and good policing. But who will save us from our underdeveloped minds and overdeveloped egos?