Two recent incidents occurred in different parts of the world and made headlines recently. One is the story of a Zomato delivery person who allegedly punched a woman in the face. The other is an incident of a San Francisco cab driver who received abuse when he asked passengers to put on their mask. How do these situations escalate so quickly? Why are people so OK with becoming antagonistic towards others; even to the point of getting violent?
This video has gone viral recently. In it, we see one of the woman passengers deliberately coughing on the driver, say something abusive and then lunge for his phone. The driver had previously asked the passengers to wear a mask and when they refused, he asked them to get out of his car. The driver has alleged that this was a racist incident, whereas the woman in the video has alleged that she did what she did to save herself and her friends from being abandoned in an unsafe location on the road somewhere.
As for the Zomato incident, the two people involved have different versions. In her version, the woman who is a social influencer says that the delivery person punched her in the face after an altercation over late delivery. The delivery man on the other hand says that the woman verbally abused him, threw her footwear at him and then injured her nose accidentally with her ring. What exactly happened may well be a third version with none being the innocent party. It may be something of a Rashomon Effect situation where each individual’s experience of the same events could be vastly different. Or each person may simply be giving self-serving versions to exculpate themselves from blame.
Rather than thinking about who the guilty party is in both incidents, what struck me is this: these are such common incidents in our daily lives --- how did they escalate so quickly and so much? Some of us may have had similar experiences or witnessed such incidents, where things just get out of hand in no time at all. Why is this?
Another way to frame the question would be to ask, why are we so willing to express that anger? Suppose there is an incident/disagreement on the road, notice how quickly voices are raised and easily things seem to deteriorate into violence even.
Now it both the above issues, with my essential feminist leanings I would at first be inclined to side with the women. However, I also acknowledge that in both instances, it was the women who were the customers and as such had some small measure of power in the sense that they could choose to complain, withhold payment and so on. In the Zomato incident, the woman in question is a social influencer which is certainly a position of power vis-à-vis a delivery person (who has already been dismissed from his job). So this is not an issue of gender or power imbalance so much as the need for self-assertion --- the need to prove that I am right and you need to accept this fact.
Where is our empathy gone? Why are so many of us willing to get angry rather than to try and understand the other point of view? For instance, how many of us choose to express our irritation at a person delivering a meal late rather than think about the difficult job they do each day? Do we think about the fact that here is a poorly paid individual who earns as per the number of deliveries he makes? Do we know how precarious his job is and how he may be forced to do it out of sheer necessity? Think about how he is reprimanded for missing items, poor quality packing and so on even though he is not responsible for those things. Think about the taxi driver who has to ferry people who may be rude, entitled and demanding – he has little choice in the matter. In both situations, the men also should have considered how women in such situations may feel threatened or vulnerable by the simple fact of being women.
The fact is that there is a great sense of anxiety among people right now. We also feel the need to defend ourselves against external threats – real or imagined. This is why our anger is so close to the surface at all times. We see others around us as somehow trying to take advantage of us; who should be prevented from doing this by any means possible. There seems to be an assumption of aggression from the other side, which is why perhaps we are so willing to be drawn into an altercation.
I do really wonder if incidents like the Zomato delivery man and the woman who abused the Uber driver can be prevented --- if we only felt a little less justified in our anger? What if we just developed a bit of empathy for others and a modicum of self-awareness for ourselves and our flaws? Wouldn’t we and the world around us be a little less angry?
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