Ambassadors of Indian Culture

A couple of days back, while walking down a nearby busy street, I noticed a motorist spitting on the road. It so happened that he almost spat on the leg of another lady pedestrian. The lady seemed to be in her mid-twenties, and was formally dressed, maybe on the way to her workplace. Her quick outburst was "...you culture-less idiot"!! Although she escaped from having to clean her dress or leg, that left her in a bad mood, and that I think, would've eventually held on to her psyche for hours during the day. If she had found a stone, I'm sure she would've hurled it at his head!

But what stuck to my mind was the word "culture-less". There can only be a culture, but nothing "less" or "more". I searched through the dictionary and found that culture is defined as follows:

The ideas, customs, and social behaviour of a particular people or society (Courtesy: https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/culture)

So, now, with the definition in hand, the lady was definitely wrong; at least grammatically!

Lets take a look at a few examples of using culture:

1. America has a gun culture.
2. Africa has a drug culture.
3. Indians have a culture of raping their women!
4. Accepting bribe is part of our culture.
5. We have a culture of idolising foreign culture
...and so on.

So, its clear that culture differs from place-to-place. 
India, especially, is a big nation, and we have a history of a varied culture. 

In recent times, we've been hearing a lot about crimes against women and girls, is this the culture that we want to cultivate?

We see videos of couples being beaten by a group of self-proclaimed moral police, is this the culture that we want to pass on to the next generation?
And it really surprises me when people go around beating others in the name of culture, thereby introducing a new culture of intolerance.

We are the present-day ambassadors of an Indian culture, that we very proudly project to people, not realising that we are only being proud at what our ancestors have done. Our present day culture is not something that we can be proud of. We do not carry forward any of the good things of the past, and at the same time, we haven't been able to successfully deal with modern culture.

History gives us enough proof that great empires have fallen due to their over-indulgence in sex, booze and internal violence. While we boast about our "great" culture, we should realise that we are not the followers of that "great" culture, and that a fall is very imminent.

How much land am I entitled for?

Usually, most of my flight travels are in the night, and I hardly get to see the "ground" below in broad daylight. I prefer aisle seats, and sleep for the most part of the journey. It so happened that my last travel was during the daytime, and I had to exchange seats with an elderly gentleman who had to frequently visit the loo! The flight happened to fly close to the Himalayas, and I was really awestruck at the sight outside. We are usually not very cognizant about the enormous size of the planet that we live on!

I decided to do some rough calculations to see if we can find out when this world will be filled by our fellow beings, and when will we be in a situation to decide that we do not have anymore space left than to sleep beside each other!

Calculation:
Surface area of land available on earth = 148,940,000 km² (Courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth)
Human Population on earth = 7.4 billion (Courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population)

Cool...so, if we were to divide this equally among all human beings, I'm entitled for about 4.9 Acres!

Now wait, our population keeps increasing at the rate of 1.1% a year on an average (Courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_growth).

At the above rate (assuming it is going to remain constant), what this means is that in 895 years, each human being will be entitled to have just 12 ft² of land, just sufficient for all of us to lie down next to each other. This, by considering the fact that we've cut down all trees, all mountains have been flattened out by then, we no longer travel by road, and multi-storied apartments are no longer possible due to high air traffic!


Side note:
The above calculation is not at all an indication of when the world will end!

High density of population doesn't mean the end of this world, it just means that we lose a lot more privacy (for those who need it), and we can gain more insights into others' life (for the more voyueristic ones). We would be fighting among each other for resources, and shamelessly reproducing like animals.

On the other hand, we have the law of natural balance (Courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_nature), by which we hope that earth will bring back equilibrium whenever one race grows beyond control, in which case our calculation above will have to be revisited! No wonder, we'll see a lot of Asian folks migrating to the West, and a lot of folks in the West migrating to Mars!

Disclaimer: The author assumes that human beings would have destroyed all other living forms before he can embark on the mission of total control on the planet earth, and make it un-inhabitable for himself. The author also declares that he's not an expert at human demography, and that predictions made above are only indicative!

The Idiot's Guide to honking on Indian roads

Over the last couple of years, I've been a regular user of a "slow-moving" locomotive for my daily commute to my office. I either use my electric bike or my bi-cycle, depending on my mood. More so, because the traffic is irritating, and maneuvering bigger vehicles requires too much concentration. I soon realised that slow-movers are objects of ridicule on the road. Even while I go about travelling on the extreme left of the roads, I was seeing that people come behind me and start honking, maybe they want to say something to me? Well, as they speed away staring at me, I hardly get time to ask them what they really wanted to tell me..."Get out of my way you.....*****?"

One honk, multiple uses!

My neighbour starts his car/ bike en-route to his office, and as he approaches the apartment gate in the basement, he starts honking. Our building, with the great acoustics that we have, starts vibrating and resonating with this great musical tone, and in this case, the security staff promptly opens the gate for him.

Once we are out in the open road, we honk at every turning, because we do not want to reduce our speed, but instead expect our fellow road user to reduce the speed upon hearing our honk.

Youngsters, who are on their flashy luxury sports bike, honk when they see a good looking person from the opposite sex, so that they can grab attention.

You are driving and the person in the front car is on the phone, you ought to honk to tell him that he is breaking the law, irrespective of the fact that you are neither wearing a helmet nor wearing a seat belt!

The vehicle moving in the front has applied brakes because he noticed a speed-breaker, but you go behind him and honk, trying to tell him that he's done the greatest crime.

There's an elderly person walking on the footpath, and we start riding our bike on the footpath to beat the traffic, go behind him and honk, to indicate that grandpa is blocking our way!

We are driving, and we notice a huge cow standing right in front of us....and we honk! Luckily, cows have learnt to pick up the meaning of our honks, and unlike homo-sapiens, they slowly and graciously move out of our way.

We are moving on the extreme left of the road, and there are people trying to overtake other vehicles from the left, and you happen to be blocking them due to your slow speed, then you've had it boy!

Honking as a communication tool

One could go about describing various uses of honking, and also various styles of honking, with special emphasis on the duration between honks. But the fact remains that honking has come to be a language of its own, and is largely used as an attention seeking technique. You cant really assign a specific meaning to a certain style of honking, but my experience says that it has become purely contextual, and hence a very universal language for communication.

In software parlance, we can notice that there's a publish-subscribe design pattern that we can apply here. We've subscribed our minds to listen to the publishing of a honk. And the correct recipient will receive it properly. In case the receiver doesn't respond in timely fashion, there's a retry mechanism that ensures that the notification is sent, and the subscriber receives it. Human mind is now accustomed to it.

Honking is also used as a bullying tool, where bigger vehicles try to intimidate you with their fancy honks. A smaller vehicle is always seen in lighter vein when compared to a bigger vehicle, and if you happen to come in the way of a bigger vehicle, you are bound to be ejected from his trajectory by means of a very loud long honk!

Why complain?

This is such a wonderful communication mechanism, I wonder why people complain about this! Except for the fact that exposure to high levels of honking can cause hypertension or other related psychological problems/ mood swings, this is not known to cause any environmental pollution, still people like to categorise honking under noise pollution...crazy!!

Conclusion

When in Rome, be a Roman! None of our spiritual/ philosophical ideologies work on the road. For the newer people who are going to drive/ ride in Bengaluru (or anywere else in India), its to be noted that as per law, unwanted honking is an offence, but we do not have provisions yet to define "unwanted honking". So, you need to wade through the traffic with constant honking, whether you like it or not.

I'm reminded of Mother Teresa's statement; "If we cant love the person whom we see, how can we love God, whom we cant see?". So lets all try to post a small smile while driving, and give some love to our fellow road users by forgiving them for a few of their mistakes, and hope they too will reciprocate in a similar way, for our mistakes!


The way we honk is an indication of the society in which we live. The prevailing honking style is an indication that nobody respects the other. The minds of people are so restless, they can hardly think of being considerate towards their fellow travellers. A little bit of compassion/ love towards the city and the people around you can drastically help in making each others' journey far more enjoyable.