Bus-piphany

The post-block phase of a blog is very exciting. It is as if I am a dam, and it is bursting... It is as if I had 500 ml coke with 2 glasses of water since morning along with 2 mugs of excellent coffee and haven't been to the loo since. Bursting, no other word. So pardon my Stephen Gould-ish punctuated posting style, but thats the way this kite flies. [I am rotfl-ing at that last line, the kite one.]

[ still otf ]

[now lol-ing]

hmm... Ok. To some serious stuff. My amateur portmanteau, though lyrically unsound, is fairly self explanatory. I had an epiphany on the bus. About that famous bus incident, a few days back, that sent the entire city in a tizzy for a few hours. 

We are pro-poor, heavily biased. Atleast I am. When Salman Khan [or those inebriated kids] mowed down pavement dwellers, it was easy to gauge which side had the public's sympathy. In the case of Mane, though people aren't on his side, no one is baying for his blood, questioning his morals and/or asking for a law to put all over-stressed, mentally damaged drivers in jail. The epiphany wasn't anything earthshaking, but I realized how pro-poor my biases are. 

It is easier to understand why and how poor people would have such problems. Debilitating stress, usually due to having to worry about food and children problems day in and day out, without respite. They are also more prone to health issues, as their standard if living is, despite everything, less hygienic than their more well off fellow humans. If the issues they have lead to complications, the cost of healthcare and pills and other things is usually prohibitive, and so on and so forth. So it is no wonder when poor people commit such acts of public law-breaking, we say, maybe the poor guy couldn't help it. He/She is deemed guilty, no doubt, but legally, not morally. 

Rich and famous people, surely, also have problems of their own. I remember a fairy tale, where a prince marries a princess-turned refugee [typical story :) ] . To test the validity of her assertion that she is a princess, the prince's mother puts a small pebble on her bed, puts 16 eider-down mattresses over it, and invites the princess to sleep on that bed for that night. The next day, the princess complains of not being able to sleep because of a lumpy mattress, proving to the Queen, that she was indeed, brought up a princess. Assuming she isn't a devious trickster who looked for such a test and faked not begin able to sleep, we come to a very important point here. A poor person would have to sleep on a cactus bed to have sleeping problems, whereas the princess could be disturbed by a piddling pebble under 16 [Sixteen!] eiderdown mattresses. But the result is the same. The magnitude of the discomfort may differ, but the end result is that they couldnt sleep. Now there are of course many caveats, what happens later, after a night of cactus sleeping, is worse than what happens due to the pebble. But the point is, that though the problems different people face seem so different in magnitude to us, the pain caused by all of them is similar. Thats my assumption. 

Even after this, I [used to] think, according to my moral principles, that Salman Khan and those kids are more guilty than Santosh Mane. Why? the crimes are the same... The reasons probably the same [mental imbalance due to the presence or absence of brain modulators]. The kids have been brought up in an environment of affluence, where everyone does their bidding, an environment where it is very difficult to learn that your actions have consequences. I make other excuses to explain their actions, just as I did for the poor. Like having to maintain a certain persona to be a successful actor, &c. &c. &c. In the end, all of them are just that, excuses. 

If, [like Susan Blackmore suggests] we look at our justice system without the framework of a sense of 'responsibility for actions' but through penalty for your actions, as a preventive and containment measure, we can see that both Salman and Santosh were and are, equally guilty. 

I dont know if this a revelation to anyone else, but I will surely keep this thought in mind when something like this happens again. There is a context to crimes, people commit them for many reasons, like stupidity or money or alcohol etc, but whatever the context, we dont have the right to judge them morally. We dont have the right to judge the parents of those kids who mowed down people in the BMW just as we dont judge Mane's family for his actions. 

post script: There are two moral outrages involved here. I am not talking about how we are outraged that the the rich and the famous get away with their crimes and aren't punished for it. That happens, and it is condemnable.