Colour blindness is a condition caused by a fault in the retinal cones. It eventually leads to an inability to see and identify certain colours. Information sourced from miscellaneous sources leads me to believe that across the world, less than 10 per cent of all men and less than 1 per cent of women are colour-blind in some way or the other.
I confront colour blindness issues on a day-to-day basis, some of which are marginally life-threatening. I refuse to believe that every person on the road is breaking that rule we religiously parroted in primary school — stop at red and move at green. Traffic signals routinely cease to denote their true meaning as commuters uniformly drive off at red, only to be stopped by an oncoming vehicle from the opposite direction. This has to be associated with a deeper health-related issue, and colour blindness is what occurs to me as the plausible reason.
Or I may just be wrong and we have become a civilisation that revels in deviant behaviour. Which brings me to a deeper, seemingly more profound, question. Why have we, as a society, effortlessly taken to not following rules? Why does it not hurt us to jump the signal, to litter in public places, to break queues? Why do we not use the strategically constructed foot overbridges (some of them, at least) but cross the road instead, causing infinite agony to ourselves as well as those behind the wheels?
My amazement knows no bounds at one particular spectacle that I am treated to every morning. Despite the constant monotone (which eventually descends to the tone of an appeal/request) by the Delhi Metro staff to let people de-board the train first, passengers waiting on the platform charge at the doors, paying no heed whatsoever to the instructions. The obvious outcome is a head-on collision, which brings back visuals of warring clans charging at each other in B.R. Chopra’s Mahabharata, sans the chariots and the weaponry. The consequences, however, are only scarcely different.
Yet again, I wonder how difficult it might be to honour this amazingly simple instruction, which is embedded in nothing but common sense. When I spare some more thought to this behaviour, the possible reason that I can think of is our seemingly unending impatience. Quite disturbingly, nobody seems to have a problem with the impatience stemming inside each us, for this has become a part of a lifestyle we have consciously adopted for ourselves. We have deadlines to meet on a daily basis. If jumping a traffic signal or breaking a queue helps us inch closer to that deadline by a nanosecond, then that reason is legitimate enough for us to take the plunge.
I have been called “slow” and a tad too patient for choosing to wait in queues at the billing counter at supermarkets. For all I know, I probably do not belong in 2015 and would have rather revelled in a foregone era when being on time mattered more than being the first one! Though I do have an incessant feeling that I might be doing something right, for I do reach my workplace “on time” every day. Clearly, score for being somewhat patient!
I might have mentioned that I do not drive to work. I invest an additional 30 minutes in my commute because I use public transport. Yes, I would happily call this an investment made towards inner peace and sanity, which I would be ruthlessly robbed of once I choose to get behind the wheels to reach office. One may argue that in recent times public transport has been just as much of an ordeal, courtesy crowds, technical snags, last-mile connectivity issues, et al. I call it a trade-off, then. I will have to encounter bigger issues on the road than within the confines of a Metro train, the reins of which are anyway not in my hands. Considering the times we live in, that is an investment well made!
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