Diffusion of Responsibility

Today's Times of India (Bangalore edition) has the headlines "Bangalore to Hyderabad: Silicon Valley keen to shift base"! The article describes the pathetic state of infrastructure in the 'Garden city' and how MNCs are planning expansion in hyderabad instead of Bangalore.

The sorry state of the roads in Bangalore is obvious to each one of the residents and visitors. These days when people meet conversations begin with traffic woes and it seems to have become a very common ice-breaker. This seems to be one topic which everyone has something to say about and we talk about this just like the English open conversations with 'Nice weather today, isn't it'! Why is it that most of the 6.1 million residents of Bangalore who talk about this day in and out aren't doing anything other than talking about it?

Yesterday I had the misfortune of going into a government office here in Bangalore. The officers refused to talk in any language other than Kannada. They feigned ignorance and were not co-operative when they heard English/Hindi. The heights of all the confusion was that the forms that we are required to fill are entirely in Kannada. To me, language is just a medium of communication. Why are these officials so fanatic about their language? They are there to do their job, and it is more than obvious that they can read, write and understand english. Why is it that the person at the Help Desk (sic!) can't focus on helping people out and is so concerned that he is being spoken to in English/Hindi. It seems 38% of Bangalore are Kannadigas. This means 62 out of every 100 people who walk into the office just come out frustrated and upset with the officials and don't question the logic.

In 'The Tipping Point" by Malcom Gladwell, the author talks about the Kitty Genovese case. In 1964, Kitty Genovese, a 28 year old Latin American was repeatedly stabbed and killed in the 20 feet distance between parking her car and the doorway to her home at Queens, NY. This incident had 38 witnesses many of them looking out of their windows. Many believed that this happened because New York was a cold and forbidding community and some even went to the extent of calling these 38 people villains. Sometime after this crime was committed, major studies were conducted to understand why and how 38 respectable law-abiding citizens watched a gruesome murder for half an hour almost as if gaping at a performance instead of trying to help. The many studies and experiments done arrived at a counterintuitive conclusion that " the greater the number of bystanders who view an emergency, the smaller the chance that any will intervene."
People tend to feel a diffusion of responsibility in groups!

That does make a lot of sense! When I am driving by and come across an accident, I'll not even try to stop if there are some onlookers. But if I am the only person around, I would probably stop and help. Probably that is why, Bangloreans are just hoping that someone else will address the infrastructure issue, especially since it is so apparent. Diffusion of responsibility could be a valid explanation for how we tend not to raise our voices for things like language disparity which could prove as an impediment to the advancement of this city and the country at large. Though this answers some questions that come up in my mind, I am still not able to think of a way I can directly contribute to the betterment of quality of life in this country!