To Obey or not to Obey?

Rules, that is. This question popped up in my mind, once again, as I was on my flight back to Mumbai and doing what I enjoy most- watching people. The air hostess announced landing and requested everyone to shut their machines and devices. The lady next to me, totally engrossed in her iPad since the moment we started the journey, did not pay attention as her ears were blocked with her headphones. The hostess then came up to her and requested her to comply. She looked up and made a few gestures towards doing so. But as the hostess went away, she continued to play the game she was playing. I itched to tell her that she was doing something with potential to jeopardise the lives of everyone in the plane. Her nonchalance annoyed me.

Well nothing so drastic happened. We landed safely. But I continued to ponder over the issue on the long trek out of the airport. To begin with: Why did that annoy me? I thought it was because someone was disobeying rules. Rules are made for the benefit of people, at large. Few disobedient people can cause trouble for the rest of us. If today, you are not allowed to even carry a nail file in cabin luggage as it a ‘potential weapon’, it’s because someone carried weapons at some time and held up a flight.

A rule breaker can cause direct, fatal damage to others. Highways report serious, fatal accidents every day because of motorists breaking speed limits, driving inebriated or overtaking wrongly. The people killed in these terrible mishaps are often those who got hit by such a rule-breaking driver.

Then there are ‘rules’ which are not in any rule book and not punishable offences. Example: Making a queue at a counter – a rule not really written anywhere I think, but socially desired- is defied and disobeyed by almost every Indian. A queue expands horizontally and becomes many queues and everyone is then for himself. If you’re polite or just not able to push, chances are you’ll be waiting for your coffee till dinner time. Just yesterday, I stood with my token in hand at a doctor’s while a lady without a token just barged in and got her work done before everyone else.

And there are rules which defy logic. Until recently when a prominent industrialist fought in court for his right to fly the national flag atop his home, doing so was a punishable offence. But there’s no penalty on selling and buying uniforms, complete with military insignia, for children to wear for fancy dress competitions. If the first somehow insults the nation, how doesn’t the second, I have often tried to understand. Or, how positions of learning and valour- school and college principals, military chiefs, judges and police commissioners-are caricatured, uncensored.

So should one follow rules completely or reason out which ones to follow or simply follow those that can have a punishment attached for non-compliance? I think most people follow the last type. We follow only the rules that have some sort of penalty attached to them. This doesn’t mean only legal rules. People also follow social rules which are unwritten for fear of rejection or disapproval of their social class.

So people comfortably break traffic rules because they know it costs just a bit of money to get away. Littering or breaking queues doesn’t make you encounter an upturned nose or glares from people around as you would face in say, Britain. So those who walk up to bins in New York, just chuck that chips packet on the road when back in India. We are, however, largely conscious of attending religious functions and ceremonies or office celebrations even if they don’t interest us because that can lead to social rejection.

And then again, History is all about those who broke rules, not about those who followed them. The venerated national leaders are those who refused to follow the rules of the Raj; the greatest scientists are those who refused to accept the norms.?

So should we follow rules or not? What do you think?