Addressed to my fellow countrymen

With the increasing cases of road rage, metro/local train rage, flight rage, and bus rage in India, it is actually time to talk about why 1.4 billion of us are angry are always angry at each other.

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ILLUMINATION

7 min readJan 2, 2023

I am prompted to write this article because it is high time that we must talk about it. A recent video has been going viral on social media about a fight on an airplane. To give you some context, the fistfight occurred in a flight going from Bangkok to Kolkata on 26th December. A man can be seen slapped multiple times by few of the passengers (Don’t worry, the link to that video is at the end of this article). According to some sources, the fight took place because the man — who was getting his face pummeled — refused to straighten his seat during the taxying due to his back problems. This led to an argument among some of the passengers sitting behind him and one thing led to another. And the beating he got was brutal. This is just one of the incidents.

In another incident, there is a scuffle between an Indigo flight airhostess and a passenger onboard a flight from Istanbul to Delhi. The two were seen arguing over a choice of meals, perhaps pertaining to the fact that he did not prebook his meals and the airline only served prebooked meals (nobody knows exactly what the reason was, I’m just making a fair estimate from what I can hear in the video). In the video, we see the airhostess yelling:

“I am not your servant. I’m sorry sir, but you cannot talk to me like that. I am an employee here.”

Another video (a relatively less known one) shows us a fight between an elderly person and two young individuals. Thankfully, this time there weren’t any punches thrown around. It was an Indigo flight too, but there’s no information on where the flight was headed. It seems to have happened when the passengers were onboarding the flight, since there were numerous people standing.

So why are these incidents becoming more common? Why is everyone dismissing this as normal?

“Yeh toh chalta rehta hai. Badi baat nahi hai.”
(Translation) “This keeps on happening. No big deal.”

From malls to trains to airplanes, we as Indians have become angrier by the day. Even a city like Mumbai, where people are known to be more generous and less likely to kill you every damn day, I have seen the count of such incidents grow in recent years. But Delhi and its nearby regions is a whole different article. And it’s maddening to say the least.

Let’s start with Overpopulation. India’s current population (as of Saturday, December 31, 2022) is 1,414,624,384 and is growing every second. This constitutes almost 18% of the world’s population. To give you a heads up, China is at 1,453,291,661. A graph comparison of population between the two countries reveals that India is all set to overtake China as the world’s most populous country in 2023. And it is not something to be proud of.

Projected overtake in 2023, taken from India faces deepening demographic divide as it prepares to overtake China as the world’s most populous country | India | The Guardian

And if you look at the numbers, you can clearly see that China has a much more diminishing yearly population growth rate than India, whose rate is pretty much stuck at 1% for the past couple of years. The large number of migrants is helping a little bit — 532,687 in the year 2020, to be precise — but the damage has already been done.

Yearly population growth rate has been reducing considerably in China. Source: China Population (2022) — Worldometer (worldometers.info)

To digress a little bit from statistical data, overpopulation could be the root of all problems arising for laymen such as myself. More people in one room would mean that we’re all competing for the same number of resources. No matter what our number is, there will still only be 10 trains in one day from one locality to another. There will still be one 3 lane Eastern freeway from South Mumbai to New Mumbai. This gives rise to more cars on the road, more people hanging for dear life in trains and overcrowded promenades.

And thus, there is one huge queue for every damn thing in this country. There is a queue for the ATM, a queue to buy your essential groceries at the supermarket, a queue to eat at your favorite restaurant, a queue for reservation of train tickets and a queue for getting into top colleges. Even the simplest things in your life would become arduous due to the fact that a queue will spring out of nowhere in your face. The moment you wake up and open the door, a race against time starts.

To give you some specifics, there are a total of 137 airports in India. There are 13,169 trains, running across 7325 stations. Apart from this, India has about 3 lakh buses operational under state transport, out of the actual 19 lakh buses present. It doesn’t take long to realize that these numbers are exceptionally low to serve the needs of the growing population. The number of airports isn’t getting any bigger, for example, another airport was supposed to be constructed in Mumbai to ease some of the load that the current airport faces. But oh well, the construction hasn’t even started, and the ETC keeps getting pushed. More on that later.

About 166 million Indians travel everyday by flight (domestic), which means that there are about 1.2 million people per airport. In trains, we get about 200k people per railway station, and 100k people per train. 238k ATMs are being used in India, which comes out to 5882 persons/ATM. And lastly, the total number of buses is lesser than one-tenth of the requirement (~2300 people/bus). Yes, these are just numbers, and if you put out charts for another country such as China, you can see that some numbers are worrisome for them too. But it still drives home an important point.

As the number of people in a region sharing one public resource increases, the process for securing said resource increases too. One must wait in line for countless months to secure a seat on the train, book their flights way ahead of time to beat the crowd and get their desired seats, wait for hours on end at the bank to change their linked phone number, and the list goes on. The need to always be better, quicker and smarter than the person in front of you will make you feel anxious, scared and more importantly fucking angry.

In those moments where the race starts as soon as you open your door, things are bound to not go your way. You might lose your temper and every day will be a rage-fest. A dog-eat-dog world such as this will get competitive with the shrinking resources, which means that people would have no other option except for thinking solely about getting ahead in time — leaving the person next to them in the dust.

It is a race: A race that starts when you’re born, and a race that only gets transferred from one generation to another. New roads, an underwater tunnel, underground metro and intracity sea links, everything looks good on paper. But the problem remains the same. More infrastructure promises us lesser congestion and less traffic, but it paves the way for more daily users, more generated demand and ultimately, it’s never enough. This is something called Induced demand.

If we don’t tackle the growing population density, especially in our cities, the festering wound will keep on making people angry. No wonder India ranks 137 in the happiness index with a score of 3.82, while Pakistan is ranked 105. Dark times lie ahead for India in 2023, when one out of every five people will be an Indian. We have stopped smiling. We have stopped giving courtesy to strangers. Anger has become a part of our lives.

This article is not intended to spew any sort of hatred toward my country. I am only putting into words, what every Indian taxpayer already knows and is sick of. We all want the same thing for our country. Overpopulation is not an easy crisis to solve, and it is far more complex that what meets the eye. It is something to think about for today — The queue will keep getting bigger. Fights will keep happening in public. Nevertheless, charity still begins at home. And we must remember that.

Thank you for reading.

References:

Addressed to my fellow countrymen

With the increasing cases of road rage, metro/local train rage, flight rage, and bus rage in India, it is actually time to talk about why 1.4 billion of us are angry are always angry at each other.

Written by Mayur Sonowal