IOTA LUPIN

The roads and the Road Transport Corporation of Kerala are complimentary in ruggedness. The conditions of both reflect the inefficiency and mismanagement of the governments which ruled here after independence. The question for which I never get an answer is, Why India (of which Kerala and other states form a part) has so many political parties and leaders than it can hold? These politicians pretend to be born to serve the people. If so, why not they give their service undauntedly to the people without competing as they do now to come to power. These Garbhasreemans* orGarbhasreemathies*(*One who has acquired excellence right from his / her mother’s womb) form the only class of people who never work, but enjoy all luxuries of life on others cost. Real parasites. Whenever I hear about theft, burglary or cheating my curiosity is to know to which party the thief, burglar or cheat belongs, because he is the part and parcel of this system, for which some of us fight and kill ourselves and our fellow beings in the name of religion, region and party making our country a sepulcher.

Oh! I have deviated from my topic. Recently I had a very unhappy experience during a travel in our state owned bus. I boarded the bus which had come from the capital city. A lady with her daughter also boarded in the bus. The lady seemed very tired. There were no vacant seats. Of the four rows of the rear seats reserved for women, two were occupied by men. The daughter reminded those gentlemen about the seats they were occupying and requested to vacate one row so that she could make her ailing mother comfortable. The occupants turned a deaf ear to the request. Some of us approached the bus conductor to intervene. He brusquely pronounced that it was not part of his duty and added that the women’s seats were in the front rows. One from us asked about the logic of writing right above the seats that they are reserved for women for which he had no answer. The girl led her mother to the front part of the bus. What a wonder!! Four rows of seats there were also reserved for women only in words written above them, but no seat left for them. The occupants refused to vacate on the claim that women’s seats were the rear ones. The driver of the bus added misery to hell by his reckless driving and applying breaks quite often as if he wanted the whole road for his own. The mother and daughter were left to in explainable hardships till they got seat when two of the passengers alighted at the next station which was about 25 kilometers away. The lady really collapsed on to the seat. The helpless tear-filled eyes of the girl still haunt my conscience and reminds me the Greek word ‘IOTA LUPINE’ the meaning of which I explained to my students sometime in the past. I settled my mind with the aphorism ‘ As is the king so are his subjects’. A question to the concerned.” How does this duplication in seats happen?. Is it not a part of exploitation? Who is to settle these types of disputes? Is n’t it the responsibility of the bus conductor and the driver? Why are the law breakers not punished or fined as per rules?