The cost of distrust
Part Two in the series ‘Tales from Travel’
Every time I travel by air, I have to remind myself that I must add nearly two hours to the actual flight time while calculating total journey time.
In the case of early morning flights, this realization has brought nothing but regret.
Air travel is hardly as efficient as it looks on paper. Add to this the rigorous and unpredictable process of getting a visa, when traveling abroad, and you wonder why all of it is so cumbersome.
A lack of trust in the society is at the root of this, I would say.
And time isn’t the only price we are paying for it.
We spend a bomb!
Since I began with travel related security, let’s look at some numbers.
The FY18 budget for the Transportation Security Administration in the US is $7.5 bn — this covers all air, train, road, pipeline travel. Meanwhile, India’s Bureau of Civil Aviation Security got INR 215 cr ($33 mn) over this fiscal.
The effectiveness of Airport security is hard to put into numbers mostly because it is uncertain if the agency has been secretive about its success or has just plain failed to add value. This article states it is the latter. Not to mention this slightly oblique research which says that tightening the noose on airport security ended up driving up road accidents and killing an equivalent of four Boeing jet full of people on the roads.
And I am not questioning basic security checks which are just to ascertain if you aren’t, unwittingly, carrying something that could cause trouble in the air. I am talking of the strip searches, the random thorough checks or, as I found recently, the ‘more detailed’ checks in US-bound planes.
I wiki’ed a list of flight incidents — and found that there have been ~40 noteworthy plane hijacks in the past 3 decades. For perspective, over 110,000 flights take off every single day. You do the math.
Not to undermine the importance of every life that was lost in these or the panic these incidents generated, but the threat in air travel seems to be exaggerated. We see how lackadaisical security checks at railway stations are, and it all fails to make sense.
The cost of fun
One might not bother too much about the systemic monetary cost of distrust but it is hard to ignore the impact it has on our mental peace while in a public space.
Let’s move away from air travel to a personal anecdote from a recent trip. A friend and I were at a beach in Miami and, after soaking in the sun, we wanted to step into the water. We had to leave behind our bags, laden with some clothing, our phones and passports. When I thought about it later, I realized that with my perception of thefts and trickery, I would have probably dropped the idea of leaving behind these bags if I were in India.
This distrust prevents people from letting their hair down in late night parties. It prevents people from being able to strike up potentially fascinating conversations with strangers in foreign lands. It makes us less human than we would want to be.
From the point of view of the society at large, this isn’t an easy problem to fix — especially since the prevailing distrust isn’t just a mindset but a consequence of incidents of the past and social scenarios of the present.
Apart from being a constant in our daily lives, solving for trust lies at the heart of all business. That’s what brand building is about, and what relationship sales means, and why aggregators for handymen, taxis and other services are thriving.
This little nugget of human nature ends up defining so much around us.
This takes a whole new dimension when we talk of interpersonal relationships. But that’s a topic for another day.
