All of us complain about almost every thing that concerns our day-to-day activities in the city. From the erring cabbie to the wrongly parked vehicle, adulteration by the neighbourhood milkman and the unwanted toffee handed over by the self-proclaimed ‘helpless’ shopkeeper, all of them never fail to draw our flak but not officially.
The mischief of the locality plumber who complicates the already perplexed state-of-affairs (water pipes so-to-say interwoven and each one more clueless than the other about its final destination) irks every resident. However the wrath transforms into love for the waterman lest we are at the receiving end of the former’s actions.
Each one of us has at some point of time or the other encountered the indifferent government official, least bothered about his responsibilities.
Not to speak of the so-called public servants missing from their desks even during the most ‘dutiful’ hours of the day or the ones refusing to perform their tasks in accordance with the expected norms. We would happily bribe the middleman at DTO instead of making an honest effort to try and streamline things. “This is the standard procedure of functioning of these offices”, would be our obvious justification.
The anomalies in the neighboring fair price shop and the highhandedness of the gas agencies do not worry us for we are rich enough to manage alternative options. Forget about the unreasonable prices offered by the road-side vegetable vendor, we care little for the undue add-ons stamped upon our children, in the form of over priced notebooks and sports jerseys, by various city schools which rob us of precious currency.
Do we ever consider raising a voice or registering a complaint to challenge the flawed ways that surround us? Given the way things are, the answer seems to be NO. Either we are born optimists who firmly believe that one fine day the mischief-makers would be miraculously enlightened by some divine intervention and cease to be evil or we consider ourselves too insignificant to make a difference.
Whatever the reason might be, we continue to evade responsibilities by simply shielding ourselves with arguments like ‘the system will never change’ and ‘this city/country is damned’. Yes, we will murmur, even curse the inadequacies and fallacies.
We all wish for a change in system and continue to express our resentment over the wrong doings that cover us but never do we care to utilize our democratic rights and question the same.
The wait to see someone else put forth a question has surely taken us to the back of the queue. We now prefer to suffer silently and just have heated arguments during tea time perhaps to prove family members that we can bring about a change!
