The Freedom of Rights

Not very long ago, I was a regular student of a primary school in a small village in northern India. Like other children, I used to play and go about my routine life. As I hailed from a respectable local family, my teachers considered building my social manners as their responsibility and regularly insisted that I called my elders as Chacha, Chachi, Tau, Bhaiya, Didi etc depending upon the age / position of the person. Addressing elders by name, thus, has been engraved as social bad manners in my mind and is responsible for my frowning upon the natives of western world when they freely address elders by first name without making efforts to be respectful (as per Indian norms).

Around the same time, I happened to get a chance to travel to a nearby popular city. As the day of my first train journey arrived, it was like a dream that came true. Due to my nagging, my father brought me to the railway station much ahead of scheduled time of train. As the time for arrival of train drew closer, I noticed a particular group build up at railway station with large milk cans with them. When finally the train arrived, this muscular group blocked normal passengers from boarding the train and loaded all the milk cans they were carrying. Since cans had already occupied most of the place in the compartment, ordinary passengers had to adjust themselves with whatever was remaining in the compartment. Soon after the train started moving, the group forced it to stop by releasing the vacuum pipe between the compartments in order to load more milk cans from the village the train was passing through. Frequent unscheduled halts like these delayed the train by more than three hours for a journey that should take about an hour and half. When asked, my father told me that it was normal practice in the local trains and there was nothing that could be done about it. From then on, I used to consider four and half hour journey to the city and squeezing myself in one corner of the unreserved compartment as my normal for local train travel. 

The reason why I narrated the above two instances is that what is passed on as correct and accepted norm during tender growing age, becomes state of normal for life and influences one's behaviour thereafter.  Whether this normal is legal or moral or civil is a different aspect altogether. 

If we carefully observe our surroundings, a very large number of events taking place may actually not be legal or moral, but they are certainly normal for most. Damaging property to protest, breaking traffic rules, littering the public places, using abusive adjectives as routine, walking on the road even when footpath is available, copying in examinations, using influential sources to obtain favours without merit, hiding income to avoid taxes, constructing private property at public land, outraging the modesty of women... so on and so forth.. Unfortunately when something illegal or immoral is practiced for too long as normal, it acquires some sort of social legitimacy and people practicing it gradually start considering it as their rights.

In so called modern India, gradually we are becoming a society that, by and large, considers breaking the rules - both legal and moral - as our right and sometimes even a fundamental one. For most, the rules are only meant for others and anyone showing a mirror is undeniably preventing exercise of something so abundantly guaranteed by the constitution - the freedom. And of course the freedom, as the word suggests, is absolute and without any boundaries. Unfortunately though, the conflict starts when one's freedom of rights clashes with the one considered his own by someone else. The examples of such conflicts are available in plenty in our society and contribute handsomely to the TRP of beaming news channels and popularity of social media.

This notion of only rights that are absolute, regrettably, keeps our society mostly on the edge and is rapidly turning its members into social bombs that can be manipulated so easily and with devastating effect. Our enemies no longer need conventional weapons to win a war and can easily trigger a civil unrest through the people who will easily explode with slightest hint that rights, which are so dear to them, are under threat.

Solution, though, lies in bringing up our children with values that are both legal and moral, rights that have boundaries and above all with respect for rights of others..

Prashant