What
I am going to describe below is a true incidence, but the protagonist shall remain
anonymous.
We
were travelling in a car and the hero, a 75 year old man of some standing in
society was sitting in the front. I suggested to him that wearing seat belt was
a prudent thing to do. His response was truly outlandish.
We
were on a short (20 km each way at best) trip to Thanjavur and there was no way
we will be crossing the state border between Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. The aged
person – and I am arrogating to myself the right to deem him a role model to our
youngsters – blurted out that in Tamil Nadu, not wearing seat belts while
travelling in a car is a non-issue. He more than implied that if and when we
crossed the border into Karnataka, where the regulation about wearing seat belt
is supposedly duly enforced, he will wear the seat belt.
I
could have been wrong in being offended at this dismissive attitude of my
companion traveler. After all, it is I who tagged him as a role model to our
youngsters without any such invitation from him. But, I think that living in an evolving
society we do have the obligation to carry out our duties as per acceptable and
accepted norms, whether codified in a law or not, and further, whether it is implemented or not.
One
such norm is that elders guide youngsters. If the elders show scant respect for
the law under the protection offered by it in the guise of it not being
implemented, I do not know against what I should bang my head. More personally,
can the hero of this real life drama accuse the next generation, and the
generations after that, of being “lawless”? The role model himself is behaving in a “lawless”
manner, I will counter. In fact, he is teaching that a law should be obeyed only when there is evidence that it is being implemented! A nice lesson for our youngsters!
I
do not think I am wrong.
Raghuram
Ekambaram
