The terrible hospital fire at an expensive private hospital in Kolkata is all the more unforgivable because it was preventable. It underlines not just complete system failure, but also utter defiance of all that is right. The system is to be laughed at or placated—who in their right minds ever bother with lights, wires, fire alarms, flammable materials, radioactive waste? That is all paperwork, saar.
The system and authorities are cheap commodities, it seems. They can be mollified with a few scraps from the immense benefits that accrue due to such callousness. Right? There must be some significant advantage to defying rules, or why would one do it? Personal machismo? Savings achieved? What is it that allows individuals and organizations to take on the moral burden of creating death traps wherever they go?
People evacuate patients after a fire broke out at a nursing home in Kolkata on 9 December 2011. AP
The hospital fire is not an isolated incident of callousness. Look around you, ye nation of the golden bird on every branch. Open manholes, where children have fallen in and died. Hanging wires, some cut midway and live. I wanted a picture of tangled wires for this article— anybody wants to help me? It cannot take you more than a minute to locate such a fire hazard. How about a pile of rubbish, breeding forces that will destroy our health? Shall we talk of potholes, of broken footpaths (where they exist) or shall we go back to talking of traffic and how we kill each other every day.
I learnt this in kindergarten—you make a mess, you pick it up. If the gas pipe people dig up a road, they must make it good. If the water pipe company does so—it becomes the company’s responsibility. Oh, and if you have a wedding or function in the family, please do not feel free to drill into the road. And if you do, please fill it up—exactly as it was. How would you like it if during a surgery, the doctor opened you up and refused to stitch you up again?
We have shamed ourselves, as a people. And we cannot keep blaming the system or the government—vile as it is when corrupt. It is up to us to create our environment, to build our communities in our own image. Look around you, and see your image reflected back. Do tell me if you like what you see. Or has learnt blindness taken over? We must not absolve the government, system or authorities of their responsibilities. Yet, it is the people who will have to lead the battle for self-respect.
Self-respect does not come from delegating responsibilities, whether to the state, the community or others. Self-respecting environments take effort to build and maintain. It starts with little things such as keeping things around you clean and in good repair, even if you don’t own it. Keeping service lanes clear. Behaving with courtesy. It does involve a little awareness of the needs of others in the community, and a clear sense of lines that must not be crossed. As a society, as a civilization, we do need to acknowledge and behave with certain maturity. We are not marauding nomads, we are a people. We build for the future, and what we build must last, so that our children may progress—not be destroyed by our callous fires and floods.
It is time to step up and shoulder our responsibilities and not expect to be policed into looking after ourselves. Each time lines on the road are replaced by cement barriers to prevent people driving on the wrong side, or cutting lanes, we know to our shame that we have been jailed. Each time taxes are paid only after an enquiry, we are feeding the police state. Each time a rule is broken by us the people, we create another reason for the state to treat us with mistrust and disrespect.
Our freedoms are ours to preserve, by our behaviour. It behoves us, for the sake of our self-respect, for our freedom and for our well-being to make the nanny state redundant—it is not their job to pick and clean after us. Let us not give them a chance to create more rules and forms that bind us. Let us not give them excuses to not do their job, just because they were busy firefighting and dealing with the consequences of our jugaad. Till we do that, do we even have the moral right to ask the state to do its job well?
Meeta Sengupta is an independent consultant in education strategy
Comment at otherviews@livemint.com
This article was published in the Mint newspaper on December 13, 2011. The link is here: http://www.livemint.com/2011/12/13004156/Making-the-nanny-state-redunda.html
Meeta W Sengupta 
In the West, people were wealthy and they could follow “rules of living in city” India looks messy because we are trying to first to survive to make a living here; and keeping tidy comes after survival as it is higher in priority. It is not clear how you define “self-respect”. We cannot make a battles for “self respect” If a foreigner comes and comments like that, we might say “we cannot set everything right, we try to keep insides of our homes neat and clean, and outside the government must keep clean” As a civilization, we do behave with courtesy, we respect elders, and give way to women, and are affectionate with all children; so do not paint us that way. We are not warlike Huns who were the real marauding nomads. We do not follow traffic rules, and the state does not disrespect us and paints lanes on the roads; we need the centre of the road painted to follow to the rule to keep left. We need the state to make more rules, because all kinds of people with various cultures live here and we did not have the same rules from where we came from. The stereotype of “nanny” state does not fit here.