Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Is there a relationship between respect for people and inventions?

After any disaster - man made or natural - all our TV channels run talk shows to discuss why we fail to recover quickly or why we can not prevent heavy losses! Last year, after the Taj attack, there was a heated discussion in NDTV, that concluded that people are not respected by government and that is why all this is happening.

I kept thinking about every now and then to see if only government does not respect people. Unfortunate discovery is, WE as individuals do not respect others. Servants are ill-treated by the employers; those who clean the roads and sewage are ill-treated by others; constables are treated badly by inspectors and they in turn are hurt intentionally by their bosses. It just means that to show our authority we ill-treat others.

We might have got this quality from our caste system or our colonial life etc. As a result of this, no one is respected in this country. Because of this disrespect, we are OK with other people's difficulties in carrying out their day to day work and hence there is no inventions from India. For example, we do not feel bad when we see a sweeper sweeping the road; so we did not invent a machine to clean the road; some other country invented the road cleaning vehicle; we buy them at exorbitant cost!!! Same thing with any other tools.

Will we ever learn to respect people? Will we ever think of simplifying their work by new tools?

Look at Indian hospitals. How long are we expected to wait? Doctors feel that waiting time is inevitable. Time is precious for everyone but this fact is not appreciated by the doctors. As a result there is no effort taken to improve the queue management, to reduce wait time!!! Doctors are in pressure always and so are the patients!!! Why?!?!?

Will we ever learn to respect people? Will we ever improve our standard of living?

Only when we learn to respect human beings, we will think of innovative ways to improve life and there will be inventions from India. Let us teach our children to respect everyone irrespective of their money, job, color, language etc; or rather, we should let children be children as they do not these differences!!! Let us not teach them to behave like us!!!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I recently met with an accident and was taken to emergency ward. Though the wound was minor, I still expected my wound would be cleaned & given proper dressing immediately as i was in 'Emergency' ward. Till all the formalities were done & money was paid, no attention was paid to the bleeding I had.
I was furious & started yelling at attenders around, only then they came. Such is the state of our country's hospitals!!
I was thinking to myself - I should've gone home instead of suffering the bleeding for 20 mins and meet my mom who was instructing to come home right away.
Lesson learnt - 1. LISTEN to your mom. (:-P)
2. Mom would take care of you even when noone in this world does.
3. Money plays vital role in today's world, if you need your life to be saved - better save money.
4. Emergency ward = High charge, same treatment of normal ward.