Been there, done that… but learnt what?

It’s that time of the year when many an Indian begins to scout for places to go abroad, and come back with a tag that says “been there, done that.” A whole load of pictures will come back as proof of their visit, like certificates for the trip lest someone doubts it.
South-East Asia, Sri Lanka, Switzerland, France, even China… they are all there on the list to choose from.

When they return, I lay a wager that some of them will talk about the sceneries, standard of living, beautiful places they visited, or the exquisite food (caviar and champagne may find a mention somewhere in the vocabulary of the Europe-returned). But almost all of them will speak about the systems that are in place in those civil societies that make living for their common people simpler, cleaner and safer.

The other day, I heard someone speak highly of Sri Lankan drivers giving way to pedestrians waiting to cross the roads, and of how disciplined they are about their traffic even if there are no cops around to regulate it.

European countries, the US and Asia-Pacific clusters, of course, are known for their civic cleanliness, traffic discipline, and a high degree of awareness among their citizens about following rules and regulations.

We know we don’t have that in us, which forces us to endure people spitting on roads and pavements, urinating in public, jumping red signals, throwing banana peels without a care about whether anyone would break a back or neck by slipping on it, and carelessly leaving garbage strewn around.

These are things that are rarely seen in most other countries that constitute the civilised world. But when the topic is brought up for debate, there are certain mentions that are inevitable in such discussions: “Our huge population is the main problem”, “We lack awareness on these issues”, among others.

These are excuses for continuing with what we have been doing all along.

We also know that complete law enforcement anywhere in our land is difficult to achieve. Therefore, the onus lies on each one of us to see that our public spaces are devoid of the filth that we have allowed our country to be associated with in the eyes of foreigners.

But there’s one thing that we are good at, and which could help us find a solution to this mess — we are great copiers of the Western world, its lifestyle, and we could easily up clean our public spaces and discipline our civic behaviour by merely copying the Western ways of civic living. But here too we have failed because despite increasing number of Indians going abroad and returning home, we have not seen any improvement on these fronts.

In fact, it is only getting worse.

Probably, that’s the reason we are great followers of rules and regulations in foreign countries, but return home to continue from where we left.

It just shows how little we have learnt from our foreign trips to clean up our own public spaces and instill civic discipline in ourselves in our own land by copying the West.
Probably, it’s easier for us to copy their lifestyle, but not their discipline.