I am always fearful and reluctant to write about a place or a set of people, mainly because in general, generalisations are never completely true. For example, it is said that dogs are loyal. Surely, there exist disloyal or downright traitorous dogs.
Once in the aftermath of a natural disaster in a certain country, someone I know had written that he was sure the people of that country would bounce back and rebuild their lives since he had visited the country and he had never met such a resilient people. Of course, in the spirit of saying kind words at a difficult time you do not scoff at such things being said, but surely he couldn't have found this one supposed national character of resilience after one visit where he interacted mainly with people in the service industry! In the face of adversity, resilience is the only choice. You can take any success story of any country and call their people resilient.
At this point though, another question arises - without gross generalisations and the elevation of very specific observations to general principles, whether correctly or not, would there exist a blogosphere? Would op-eds and opinion columns exist? Would anyone ever say anything broad and intelligent? Specificity and accuracy are the enemies of profundity. If you go your whole life only making sure you're standing on firm ground, you might never take a step in any direction.
There's an even better argument to justify spouting grand principles solely on the basis of one's own observations with a limited perspective - everyone else does it. Every other person seems to have a substack or a medium profile. And some archaic folks with not much intelligent to say also have good old blogspot.com pages that they rarely update! And how can a person who has returned to India after a while not spout some gyaan!
With this preamble, let me ramble a bit about my experiences.
I spent the best part of the last 3 years in Europe, most of it in Rome, Italy. To be precise (and not profound), it was a total of 4.5 months in Germany, 2 months in the German-speaking part of Switzerland, around 3 months visiting India and the rest (excluding vacations) in Rome. A friend from the UK described Rome to be a part of the 1.5th world - not quite first world but not close to third world.
Although I understand where this remark comes from, for me it was amazing to see how much greater the quality of life can be in a developed country. And this comes not from the society or people, but from the state and institutions. Education and healthcare are essentially free. I had to pay 150 euros annually to have complete state-covered health-care. (Which I hardly used, maybe a total of 3 visits to the doctor. So hey, I actually put money into the system!) And two other aspects I found wonderful - security and clean air.
By security, firstly I mean physical security. You will hear it said again and again that Rome is a city of thieves and pick-pockets. I am someone who by nature is always acutely aware of my pockets. I have never had a single wallet or phone stolen or lost (touch wood). And the pick-pockets in Rome are those who do it on the sly, not violent muggers. You can safely walk in the dead of the night with no fear.
And while I read about how winter smog at Rome is terrible, I found the air to be perfectly breathable compared to Bengaluru. Maybe the air is even cleaner in other cities of Italy, but I never had any complaints.
A natural question would be to wonder why I would be happy paying 150 Euros (around 13,000 rupees) a year when if I hadn't paid it, I would have spent say 20 Euros a year on my visits to the doctors? The answer again is security.
You feel safe, say while playing football or crossing a street, that if something bad happens here, I have some safety net. Some institution to turn to. And I realise that living in India (I've been back here for around 10 days now), this is what is seriously lacking. Security.
And I don't mean in the sense of the risk of violent crime. Bengaluru is easily one of the safest places to be in the country. There's other types of insecurity. I'm essentially one wrong step or one health-condition away from not only bankrupting myself, but from destroying a good part of whatever wealth my family has created over many generations.
But that's only one of the bigger issues - healthcare being expensive is a fact of life in most parts of the world, much like education. My parents worked really hard to send me to a good school. Good options for education shouldn't be so rare and so expensive relative to the average income of a place.
Then there's the little issues of security - I never know when a policeman will catch me while riding my scooter for a random check. Firstly, this is illegal - a policeman can pull you to the side only if he sees a violation of some rule. And secondly, you know that you will be made to pay a bribe because of some obscure rule violation and even if all your documents are in order, you will be lied to about a rule, or be given subjective charges like "rash driving". The truth is, in the internet age, you can take the time to look up every single rule and argue your case with the policeman. But it will be a true hassle, and you need the presence of mind and the time to do it. I personally freeze, and I know most of my friends do as well, because of the power this policeman has over you. Not to harm you bodily, but in general to be a nuisance and a chore. And also the stories you hear about the behaviour of such policemen in general.
Now with the digitisation of everything, law enforcement has become more "efficient", in that the policeman can extract your entire vehicular history with violations which are recorded by video cameras. Cameras on terrible roads carrying several times their capacity in traffic, poorly organised and not at all policed. So nothing around you works as it is meant to, nothing is built to handle current capacity, but you alone in your infinite wisdom fighting this chaotic traffic, dust and smoke will be fined a fortune for a small violation that some AI camera detects - The robot-ruled dystopia is truly here!
No one respects the law because the law is not worthy of the respect it should be getting. What grinds you the most is the arbitrariness. Today I witnessed the common scene of the police vehicle going out to tow away vehicles parked in no-parking areas. There were a series of vehicles parked in front of a row of shops and the police-workers (they're not even regular cops) picked up the first few vehicles they could find and took them away. We know full well the owners will be called to the police station and harassed unless they quickly take the easy way out and pay the bribe.
But here's the thing - if indeed it was law "enforcement" that was happening, every single vehicle parked there must have been taken away, not the three nearest vehicles. If there aren't enough police vehicles to tow away all the violating vehicles, then maybe there are too few parking spots and no-parking signs are unnecessarily placed everywhere. Every year tens of thousands of new vehicles are sold in the already very cramped Bengaluru. So either such nice spots near busy market-places and temples shouldn't be classified as no-parking zones just for the heck of it. Or separate spaces for parking should be built. The signs are put-up and the laws are made as if there is a great degree of organisation involved. Once in-place, there is no capacity to implement the law correctly.
Now imagine if all the vehicles parked there were towed away by the police - do they have the space to keep them until a claimant turns up? Most certainly not - I see all these vehicles kept at the Malleswaram Circle underpass. So actually the vehicles which were innocuously parked at the side of a narrow side-road with lots of pedestrians are now kept by the police on a major, busy road built exclusively for vehicular movement.
There is a delusion about how the laws "should" be. Maybe there is some principle such as "the sides of narrow roads shouldn't be used as parking spots". But that principle is for well-organised cities with large dedicated parking areas and wide arterial roads that also allow parking. The principles are applied with no care for whether it is locally relevant. So essentially anywhere you park your vehicle is a no-parking zone. And the police will arbitrarily pick-up 3 of those vehicles to harass you and extract the most they can as a bribe because let's face it, there's no way they can actually implement the senseless laws based on a principle that was designed for a different context. Another example of such a law is the outlawing of even the possession of crackers in NCR this year while the whole city happily celebrated Deepavali. In the meanwhile the twitter page of Delhi police posts "success" stories of everyday citizens being apprehended for the crime of doing what almost everybody else is doing.
And in this way there is a constant insecurity when dealing with any organ of the state for an Indian.There's a common phrase expressed in Kannada "ಕೋರ್ಟು ಕಚೇರಿ ಅಂತ ತಿರ್ಗಾಟ", an equivalent of "moving pillar to post". It is the greatest fear to have to go to court. In fact I know of certain people who didn't report a fraud and theft of great amounts of money and valuables because it's considered ill-luck for a policeman to enter your house. I share this attitude as well to a large degree - A life where you never have to deal with the police, the law and the judiciary means a life without any troubles. "The process is the punishment".
Laws and regulations on paper are idealised and equivalent to any high-end, 1.5th world state, implementation is arbitrary and extractive precisely because it is unimplementable due to a lack of capacity. And this eventually overburdens everybody - the judiciary, the police, the citizen. There's so many other issues here. Policemen probably aren't paid anywhere near what is actually a really hard and really important job. I don't know what kind of training they receive. I know I'm probably just scratching at the surface of what has to change. Lot more judges are needed to take-up case pendency which is running in crores, but for that one has to first look at educating so many people in the law. This would be hard because the judiciary and the constitution can probably be understood only after a degree in English grammar studies followed by a degree in law. (I exaggerate, but take the time to read some of the judgements passed by our higher judiciary - not only are they excessively lengthy, you might need a Latin dictionary handy to understand it. I don't understand how a clear account of the case, the charges, the evidence and the verdict together can ever cross more than say, 50 pages.)
But what I saw in my time in Italy I think was very instructive, precisely because of the "1.5th world" nature of that country. I think "first world" is basically a set of working systems with a shiny exterior. Rome often has chaotic streets with wayward driving, garbage piling up, an alarming number of buses catching on fire and other civic issues. The exterior is far from shiny. But the basics, the fundamentals, as far as I could see, are extremely sound. And despite the language barrier, the bureaucracy, the first time living by myself, the different culture, the pandemic and the absolutely stifling bureaucracy, I got the sense that underneath it all is a system that's meant to function in the setting it is located in. And with people who are used to a basic level of function and hence behave in a more civil way, without seeking to extract, both from above and under the table, in every situation. (I'm sure my Italian friends will completely disagree with me here. Sadly, they constantly suffer from comparisons with countries like Netherlands, Germany, Sweden etc. and hence believe that their country is the most wretched with nothing functional. Apart from a few glitches, I see a very very functional, smooth-running country. with a population of warm, friendly people. And I truly appreciate the sense of overall security I felt when I was there.)
When I was younger I had a simpler explanation for what I saw around me in India - the systems are fine, the people manning the systems are corrupt, immoral and beyond redemption. Now I do not share this view - people are people. Given avenues for corruption, people will be corrupt. Given incentive for good behaviour, people will behave well. When I look at Italians, I sense this bursting desire towards disorder,
but systems which keep their faith in a measure of order.
Look at the metro rail systems in India - When the trains are functional, regular, efficient and clean, even I stand in a queue and don't rush in head-first into the crowd. Habits are built slowly.
I don't think what I'm saying here is particularly original or novel, but somehow I see hardly any people talking about these structural things.