Answering the Why

I was talking to Chanda yesterday at Tapri.

As is our wont, we ordered tea and went to sit at Bizzare which, for some reason does not cater to the morning crowd. I was helping Chanda up the ramp when the absurdity of that situation struck me.

The ramp had supposedly been built expressly for people like Chanda who have difficulty getting up the stairs, to be independent. Instead she ended up having to depend on me for climbing the very ramp that was designed to make such dependence redundant. I mentioned this to her and she gives me the look which says "This is the stuff I have to put up with on a daily basis."

It confounds me on a daily basis why people don't think about what they are doing and why they are doing it. And even if they do, at the execution level, any such thoughts are overcome by a powerful SEP field(Somebody Else's Problem). 

If only the worker making this ramp had been told that it was to make Bizzare more accessible to people on wheelchairs, he/she would not have made such a steep incline or an impossible right angle turn to get to the ramp. If they had been told that Chanda had to climb the ramp, they might have gone ahead and put up a hand rail along with it.

But very often people on the frontline are not told why they do something and it is assumed that they know or worse, that they don't need to know. And if such a person does have this information, very often they are not in any position to change what they know to be short sightedness. This leads to the most disgusting of those traits- shoulder shrugging. 

The Stanley Milgram experiment has shown that people LOVE to obey an authority figure even to the point of dystopia. So obviously absurdly pointless and seemingly harmless orders are a given to be followed. Is this the militaristic attitude we want to set up in our society? 

We laugh at the stupidity of what we have been asked to do, yet we do it. 

Why? 

Is it the security that we will not be censured for having followed orders? Is it the cynical attitude that we have already been paid and now there is no incentive to do the job any more properly than was agreed? Or is it that we realize that if we do this job to an acceptable level, not necessarily the best level, we get another opportunity to make more money?

I have observed that each of these is true in different scenarios. And very often they are viewed as (read confused with) good business sense.

(EDIT: post the first BGL class on 23rd December, a new dimension has been added to the way of looking at this problem. Maybe if the laws pertaining to accessibility were stricter in India and were enforced religiously the accessibility related issues would gradually disappear over time. However, what does it speak of us as a society if we need laws to police us being human?)