We woke up, again, to a Train Accident. Some dead, some injured. And life goes on.
Indian Railways is the oldest, largest, and busiest in the word. With such large network, mistakes ‘here-and-there’, loss of life ‘here-and-there’ is expected. Who does not make mistakes? After all, those manning the systems are humans too. And so travels one of our many arguments.
We don’t have any system. There is corruption everywhere. Nobody cares etc. etc. – These “age old oft repeated phrases” are another aspect in our arguments. It seems, we have received generalized set of arguments as heritage from our forefathers.
Arguments will never run out of sides. We are so enthralled by arguments that we quickly forget the real issue. We are Glib (checkout this word). We take quick refuge in perfect reasoning. We have ready answers to almost everything. We know which Reasoning will find common ground and hurry to claim it. In the end, we don’t make any difference, after all.
Realizing this niche market, media steps in and we have “The Big Fight” and “We the people” and some more of these wrestling in various other channels. Look, even our disasters have a market. Like FMCG we also have FMMD (Fast Moving Marketable Disasters).
There was train accident yesterday, there is one today, and there will be one tomorrow. A train collided exactly the same way yesterday and today and it will hit the same way tomorrow. I don’t mean, why they don’t hit differently tomorrow. Despite losing so many lives over the years, why are the Railways doing us in the same way every time. Why don’t they change?
The answer lies in transformation not change. Resistance to change is old as humanity itself. Nobody wants change. It causes disruptions, pain or death. Yes, Change causes death. How? We come out on the streets protesting against change, the crowd goes haywire, police fires, and some people die ‘here and there’, – this is how change causes death.
That is why; our corrective approach should not be in terms of change. It should be in terms of repercussions. Repercussion is the reason why Soviets and Americans never went to war. Closer home, India and Pakistan avoids conflict. But had there been a war, there will be repercussions which will lead to transformation.
But we don’t have to go that extremes of war. To make anti-venom, you require miniscule venom. But you do need venom. People in charge of Human Lives, both directly and indirectly, should be made responsible to face repercussions if and when those lives are lost. A railway employee should think – what will happen to me if people die. By Employee, I mean from Ground level up to the top. A precedent or two is also necessary. A ‘group think’ should be – What happened to them when people died in their watch. This will have more impact within the system.
The first man who entered the lion’s den discovered repercussion. Since then transformation of Humanity is mostly through series of repercussions. Either we learn from personal repercussions or take example from others who faced it and lived to tell the tale. We don’t fall for fun. We have internalised the repercussions while learning to walk. So till such time we don’t apply this repercussion theory to monitor and transform our systems, we will make “Argument” as the only safest traveller.
neerajshrivastav 