Does this happen in Pune alone?

I am sure it does happen in other places as well, but I picked up these two instances from two of my friends.  I hope others will write in their experiences as well.  After I wrote the last post, these two instances jumped up from some corner of memory and asked to be posted up here.

The first one pertains to the period after Pune was flooded with Panshet waters in 1961.  Bank of Maharashtra had a branch at Deccan Gymkhana.  It is still there standing proudly.  This branch was flooded completely and all the ledgers were washed out.  Those days there was no system of back up.  The branch accounts must have been consolidated and carried to the higher office, say, Regional office.  But these gave the overall picture of the branch as a whole.  After the cleaning up was over, branch operations had to restart for individual customers.  The Bank management issued an advertisement and invited account holders to submit an application stating the last known balance as per their passbooks and subsequent transactions if any.  If at all, discrepancies could arise with regard to the amount deposited by way of cash and where the counterfoil was not available with the customers.  Withdrawals could be checked from the passbook entries.  Of course, there were customers whose houses had been submerged and had lost their passbooks and other records to the fury of the floods.  At the end of a laborious compilation of individual records, the Bank found that the discrepancies were very marginal.  In other words, customers, by and large, had stated the balances with their honesty intact.  This happened almost fifty years ago and one can say that things have changed for the worse now.  This instance was told to me by my friend, Dileep S Kulkarni.

The Deccan Queen that runs between Pune and Mumbai is an institution and not a mere train.  Regular travellers have strong emotional attachment to the DQ and they have evolved a strong bonding among themselves.  The regulars are known as Season Ticket holders.  There is a first class and also a second class Season Ticket.  Both classes of regulars have their own codes and norms.  My friend Pushkaraj Apte tells me that the first class Season Ticket holders have a system of forming the queue on the platform.  They come before time and form a queue at the spot where the first class compartment is usually parked.  Once the train arrives from the yard into the station, they enter the compartment strictly according to the queue.

It so happened once that the Station Master had to change the platform from which the DQ was to depart.  Already the regulars had formed the queue on platform no.1.  There was an announcement that the DQ will now come on platform no.3.  It was open to the regulars to rush to the new platform and form a new queue or to grab the seat that they liked.  What happened was that the whole queue moved like an army column from platform no.1 on to the overbride and down to platform no.3.  No one left the queue and no one jumped it.  I think this happened about 10-15 years ago.  To me it shows that not only can we follow externally imposed discipline, like the one seen in Akshar Dham, but we are also capable of self-discipline.

And as they say, everything opposite is equally true in India.  So we are capable of stampedes, chaos and trampling, as well.  It is our choice, what we want to do.

Students speak....

Janasamwaad is about dialogue with people on the most vital issues.  Now who decides what is vital?  Each one of us feels strongly about some issues or the other.  We have conversations around those issues and if some of us want to do something about it and others join in, those issues are vital to us at that point of time.  There does not have to be a list of issues for all people for all times to be termed as vital.  That list would be listless.  We need to have issues which are full of life. 

The other day I was going with my nephew, Bhargav, to Akshar Dham temple complex.  Bhargav was visiting us during his vacation from the second year BE course in Pune.  He got used to the traffic here in the NCR region.  Yet he could not but comment on the highway driving habits of the people here.  On his own he said, " we need to have basic education of traffic rules and traffic sense in India."  I probed his opinion a little more.  He said that as a young driver, nobody anywhere taught him the basic discipline of traffic.  He had to think and pick it up himself.  This is the story with most of us.  So how do we learn?  We learn by observing others and picking up what suits us most.  The end result is that we get into each other's way and hair.  The road is the best exhibition ground of our civic sense.

I asked him,"But isn't this taught to you in the Civics section of social sciences?"  He replied in the negative.  What is taught under Civics is about the state and its organs down to local self government.  Well that is useful no doubt.  But could we not start with those every day experiences that children have?  One could start with traffic, then move on to police, courts and law.  We could have another strand starting with Water supply and drainage, taxes and municipal administration.  Then one could move on to elections and democracy and as students gain sufficient familiarity with public affairs, they could then be taught the basics of Indian constitution.

This is the way I have understood the basic thrust of Janasamwaad which Suhas Tapaswi and his colleagues are painstakingly trying to convey to the rest of us.  What was significant to me was the self-reflective comment of Bhargav that nobody had taken the trouble to explain the traffic discipline to him.  We then moved on to Akshar Dham, where hundreds of volunteers were organizing thousands of visitors through well defined channels.  There was wave after wave of crowd coming in but there was no chaos.  People were constantly guided and instructed till they entered the temple precincts.  After that they were free to move around as they pleased.  The boundary conditions were held tightly by the volunteer force.  But the discipline was not draconian at all.  We can do it in a disciplined way.  That was the confidence one could get from the Akshardham experience.