Sunday, January 16, 2005
Road Rage - Part I
What is the big deal? I asked myself. After all, all the other guy did was to cut him off. This produced a reaction in my friend, which I felt was over the top – he decided to make a rude gesture and honk. Why get so animated over this? I could not understand what my friend was getting riled up about. We were on the road in the UK, a few months after I arrived there as a student and this was my first brush with Road Rage.
A few years later, after arriving in the US, I heard of the word “loser” being used to describe the losing team in the finals of a long and arduous competition like the Baseball World Series. I was used to the word "Runners Up" until then. However, 163 regular season games and several months of playing brilliant baseball right through later and after providing delight to their fans all season long and coming up just short in a grueling seven match world series competition, the team receives this as a reward - "Ladies and Gentlemen, may I now call upon the losers of the World Series to receive their 2 minutes of commiseration on not being the winners!". Hello! Didn’t this team like beat everybody but one team till now?
Over the years I have also heard of the word “Poor white trash” to describe those who dwell in trailer parks or are homeless. Coming from a country where the number of poor far outnumbers the number of rich, I found this reference a little baffling. I have since come to realize that it is not so much borne out of a lack of compassion on the part of the society in general here but a frustration at the inability of the trailer park types to get up, shake off their lethargy and “win”.
So what has all this got to do with Road Rage?
Perhaps the people swearing, honking, making rude gestures and even sometimes chasing one another to "get even" were mere symptoms. Could the illness itself be more chronic? The illness of bottled up frustrations perhaps?
After all, we live in an extremely unforgiving, cut throat world. And one cannot isolate competition to certain spheres of life and not let it permeate your being in other ways. Competition leads to a lot of good as it spurs people to achieve more than one would when left unchallenged. But, alas competition also produces winners and losers. And a society that scorns upon losers in its quest to produce winners.
Being a winner could mean different things to different people – to some it could mean tasting success in the stock market, to others it could mean being the star at the quarterly board meeting, or being recognized at work amongst peers and emerging at the top of the ranking that decides compensation reviews, it could mean securing the highest GPA at college or something as seemingly mundane as winning the round of golf against one’s overly competitive buddies.
However, on average, how many winners does a normal day produce, I ask myself. One has a sneaking suspicion that there are more people who don’t win than those who do in an average day. While we would like to think of ourselves as people who take the “disappointments” in our stride, frustrations do have a way of coming out and we subconsciously seek ways of venting them from time to time.
And in the absence of too many opportunities to do so, the guy who is going too slow in front of you on the road or the guy who cuts in front of you without warning is good a guy as any to use as a punching bag. Or if it gets really bad, how about mouthing off at a Customer Service Rep who cannot get your overcharged phone bill sorted out? After all she is paid to listen to you and hearing your complaints is her job.
A few years later, after arriving in the US, I heard of the word “loser” being used to describe the losing team in the finals of a long and arduous competition like the Baseball World Series. I was used to the word "Runners Up" until then. However, 163 regular season games and several months of playing brilliant baseball right through later and after providing delight to their fans all season long and coming up just short in a grueling seven match world series competition, the team receives this as a reward - "Ladies and Gentlemen, may I now call upon the losers of the World Series to receive their 2 minutes of commiseration on not being the winners!". Hello! Didn’t this team like beat everybody but one team till now?
Over the years I have also heard of the word “Poor white trash” to describe those who dwell in trailer parks or are homeless. Coming from a country where the number of poor far outnumbers the number of rich, I found this reference a little baffling. I have since come to realize that it is not so much borne out of a lack of compassion on the part of the society in general here but a frustration at the inability of the trailer park types to get up, shake off their lethargy and “win”.
So what has all this got to do with Road Rage?
Perhaps the people swearing, honking, making rude gestures and even sometimes chasing one another to "get even" were mere symptoms. Could the illness itself be more chronic? The illness of bottled up frustrations perhaps?
After all, we live in an extremely unforgiving, cut throat world. And one cannot isolate competition to certain spheres of life and not let it permeate your being in other ways. Competition leads to a lot of good as it spurs people to achieve more than one would when left unchallenged. But, alas competition also produces winners and losers. And a society that scorns upon losers in its quest to produce winners.
Being a winner could mean different things to different people – to some it could mean tasting success in the stock market, to others it could mean being the star at the quarterly board meeting, or being recognized at work amongst peers and emerging at the top of the ranking that decides compensation reviews, it could mean securing the highest GPA at college or something as seemingly mundane as winning the round of golf against one’s overly competitive buddies.
However, on average, how many winners does a normal day produce, I ask myself. One has a sneaking suspicion that there are more people who don’t win than those who do in an average day. While we would like to think of ourselves as people who take the “disappointments” in our stride, frustrations do have a way of coming out and we subconsciously seek ways of venting them from time to time.
And in the absence of too many opportunities to do so, the guy who is going too slow in front of you on the road or the guy who cuts in front of you without warning is good a guy as any to use as a punching bag. Or if it gets really bad, how about mouthing off at a Customer Service Rep who cannot get your overcharged phone bill sorted out? After all she is paid to listen to you and hearing your complaints is her job.
