In day 15 post, I
briefly touched upon a ground up effort to create trust in our Govt and system.
To build trust, we need to first understand why it does not exist in our
society. A story comes to mind which my friend shared on WhatsApp some time
back. The same is reproduced here:
“In a village of yore
when people were simplistic and more honest, a merchant started a practice of
selling milk in a self-service format. He used to store milk in a large jar in
the centre of the village market. At one cowrie (old currency unit) per seer
(old weight measure), people could take the milk and put the money in a kullar
(earthen container). The practice was well accepted and had become a
norm. The merchant was happy with his profits and the villagers used to get
good milk at an affordable price.
After some time,
a smart person thought, 'How will the milkman know If I take more than one seer
of milk or pay less than one cowrie? After all, many people buy the milk and it
won’t make a difference.' A couple of other people also followed
suit. Over the next few days, the milkman found that he was not getting as many
cowries and his expenses were not getting covered. So, he started diluting the
milk with water, to factor in the pilferage. He also raised the price to compensate
for the short payment. Over the next few seasons, the milk price slowly
rose to two cowries per seer and the quality was also not what it used to be.
The entire village,
which was earlier a happy village used to good quality milk at reasonable price,
now was an unhappy village which was getting low quality milk at a higher
price. Over time, the village people forgot when and why the prices had started
rising, and were left only with their feeling of dissatisfaction. The merchants
blamed the villagers, and the villagers blamed the merchants.
This brings us to a
pertinent question: who is responsible, the milkman or the person who started
the practice of gaming the system?
Furthermore, it
reveals an important aspect of our present-day situation. Our society, which
can have many aspects of its costs reduced to a lower level, is not
able to reduce costs as someone somewhere is trying to game the system and
get an undue advantage. The net result: the entire society ends up paying a
price.
That, my friends, is
what a few corrupt people can do to a largely honest society. It raises cost
and prices of everything because like it or not, Money follows the law of
energy i.e. it’s never created or destroyed, it merely changes form and
hands. And corruption makes it costlier at each and every change of
hands!"
As we see, a trust-based system works
only when everyone adheres to the rules and does not cut corners for private
profits. More importantly, while not explicitly said in the story, all of the
villagers had access to milk, but herein lies the rub for our current
status. With high disparity of incomes, means, and education, for historical
reasons we are a work-in-progress society. Resultant of this disparity is that
what’s sauce for the goose is not sauce for the gander! So, all the while we
were fretting about our inability to have smooth roads, like able politicians
who meet our slick standards, and that damn smoke cloud over the city, the
other half of the citizenry was scrounging for scraps to survive. In between
our aspiration for click-button trust and reality is a chasm for everyone to
cross from either side of it. In this, educated and arrived folks have a higher
responsibility.
My suggestions for improving the trust
at a personal level and within one’s influence circle:
1. Communicate and don’t
confuse it with pontification
I have worked with some brilliant
supervisors & leaders in my 25 years of professional life. If I have to
identify one common strand of behavior amongst all of them, it would be their
ability to listen and break down difficult problems into easy to understand
parables to help everyone align to the objective at challenging
junctures. Communication must be a two-way radio which,
as long as modulated right, will keep moving the society towards better trust
levels. A one-way radio, a.k.a. 'pontification', is a sure recipe for disaster,
leading to unmitigated confusion across strata of society.
2. Volunteer
It does not matter if it's on the right
or the left, one should spend some time on a weekly basis volunteering for
a task/outcome for a segment of society that does not belong to. Work hard to
create confidence among them about the benefits of the outcome being worked
towards, and soon people will come around to accepting your vision.
3. Unbiased thinking
Remove your fear and engage with people
of different opinion, religion, color and region. Let’s reserve stereotypes for
our commando comic new channels (do watch them for the fun of it), for let us
open vistas of reaching out and observing things anew. For this, one has to
engage with the forthrightness of doing it, instead of conniving and pretending
to do it.
The above are simple to do things, none
of which requires complex pieces of legislation, permission, or money. Just
start doing it and see how the change happens.
Lock down folks is here to stay while we
wait for a formal announcement from Govt. Focus will inexorably move to livelihoods
& restart. Folks 35 years old and more (who lived early part of life in
India) would remember the diesel engines which required an effort to start once
they had gone cold. The owners of these diesel auto’s and pumps would start
effort early morning to make them ready for work. Some would even light fire
under these engines to heat up and consequently start & move. Hopefully we
will not need to start fire under us, to kick start the system put off (and probably
going cold) in next month.
Stay positive & stay engaged.
Well said...
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