Tooting and Trust

Yesterday, I took leave of absence from my beautiful garden and the comfort of my couch, to migrate to the barn we own halfway up the hill. It was home once, and may be again, but at this time, the grounds are overgrown, the furniture sparse, and the kitchen bare.

We had barely settled into the rickety pine chairs of its small verandah, when the ancient gardener spotted intruders plucking ferns from our forested backyard. Premila shot off to shoo them away, but when it turned out that they were the young Indo-Dutch couple building a home a hundred yards away, she softened, and invited them to come and sit.

“All we can offer you is water”, she said.

And by way of explanation, “We’re not living here”.

“But”, I continued to explain, “sometimes the noise from the road gets too much for me, and weekends in June can be a traffic nightmare, so I decided I needed to spend the day up here.”

This morning, before the tourists surfaced, we drove up to the reserved forest. The smiling guard at the checkpost recognised us from last week,

“Walking up to Mukteswar again?”

“No - this time, we’re planning to explore the jungle paths down into the valley.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“Remember, I don’t know you, and you never met me. That way, if an official intercepts you, neither of us will be in trouble.”

I winked back, and we descended into dark, forested slopes, dense with leaf-litter. After an exhilarating hour of slithering and bush-whacking, we sweated our way back to the road, and gave young Sanjay Negi a smart salute of thanks as we stepped into our car.

Premila stopped off to buy some groceries, and I found a parking spot near a bend in the road. Above me, and below, the concrete skeletons of budding hostelries were taking shape. Building materials had been dumped on both sides of the road - ribbed iron rods under my car tires, and massive piles of river rock opposite me, obscuring the white lines that announced that this was tarmac, not dump site, and constricting the already narrow road.

Vehicles came hurtling up the middle of the road, saw the blind curve, the narrowing strip of road, and - what else - hooted. Others came careening down, saw the piles of rock with a sense of alarm, and hooted.

Joop, the young Dutchman who sipped water with us yesterday, said of the hotel where they were staying, “It’s on a curve, so we get a lot of honking there as well.”

Joop was assuming that there is a logic to our horniness. Perhaps. But to that I would add impatience, nervousness, and above all, a lack of trust. If the vehicle coming around the bend sticks to its side of the road, and I to mine, neither of us need to announce our presence. Whether the road is empty or not, each of us will slither smoothly around the curve, without fear of collision. Without blowing the horns that drove me out of my home yesterday.

But that requires trust that every other driver, without exception, will be doing the right thing, steering the right path. If that trust is lacking, then blowing my horn is the logical thing to do. Not blowing my horn could literally put my life on the line. And so, the drivers who course our hill road every summer weekend blow their horns as if their lives depend on it.

Our city drivers hoot because they don’t trust the vehicle in front of them to stick to its lane. City commuters spill onto the road and hold up the traffic because they don’t trust the bus driver to pull up to the stop, and wait for them.

India’s pioneers of e-commerce had their own voyage of discovery when they found that COD (Cash on Delivery) was required to persuade customers that on-line orders were not fraudulent by design. COD has largely vanished from the western world, but in India, it still runs to about half of orders placed online. Earlier, one could have ascribed this to the low access to credit cards or other means of on-line payment. But now, you can buy coconut water with a payment app, and 85% of households own a smartphone. It’s not payment technology that’s missing, but trust.

Students of sociology tell me that India is characterised by low levels of generalised trust, but high levels of trust in government. It’s complicated. We trust the Supreme Court, but believe that lower courts are corrupt. We revere the Armed Forces, but are suspicious of the police. We don’t trust politicians, only ‘our’ politicians. And when it comes to health and education, sectors dominated by governments in most parts of the world, Indians strike an extremely mistrustful path - we won’t take a family member to a government hospital if we can afford private. Or put our kids in a government school.

Most lay-people believe that education and health are public goods. While they are good for the public, their benefits do have a very strong private nature as well - if my son goes to Harvard, despite Trump, the benefits are largely private to him. And if I get myself dental implants to replace my aging teeth, the pleasure of crunching peanuts is all my own.

But I won’t get into the weeds of what is still a thriving debate about the nature of private and public goods. Rather, I will say that the supreme public good of society is Trust. The absence of trust is highly corrosive. It leads to high costs of compliance, low risk-taking ability, and a worship of those in power. Not because we trust them to do the right thing, but because we need them to get routine work done - building permits, road contracts, land transfers, environmental clearances…

If our nation is to prosper, we need to transition to a high-trust society. Where we can trust teachers to teach, doctors to heal, policemen to uphold the law, and each other to keep to our side of the road. It’s a long journey, and those in power have little incentive to steer us there, extracting as they do huge amounts of rent because systems are not transparent and their blessings are critical to all major successes.

Change, if it comes, will not come from above. It will not come from mass media, which has increasingly prostrated itself to power. It will come from each of us, trying to do the right thing. Talking to each other, in gentle but persuasive manner. Doing what is right, even if others don’t.

Where we go, maybe they will follow. Those who call themselves leaders, but thrive by exploiting and manipulating the most base of our instincts. Only if we raise ourselves to see the common good, will they.