The Hindu Business Line : Age of rudeness

Side by side, the world seems also to be sliding into the age of rudeness, as a paradoxical by-product of the very revolutions taking place in the area of communications and lifestyles.

E-mail and SMS have made the art of letter-writing obsolete and done away with epistolary elegance. There is no regard for spellings, sequence or syntax.

It is all now single letters doing duty for whole words, with nothing resembling the leisurely exchange of news of events and commentaries on developments at home or outside. One straightaway plunges into what one has got to say in a quick staccato burst as of bullets with no preambles or superscriptions.

In most households, both husband and wife go to work: Partly this is because of men and women almost in equal proportion acquiring higher educational and technical qualifications, but largely, it is also due to the need for resources to meet the high cost of living.

They have to put in long hours in office, leaving their children in the care of grandparents or hired domestic help. Living in a constant state of stress and guilt, they are on short fuse most of the time.

The hectic pace of life leaves no time or inclination for finer decencies and graces in social intercourse, leave alone the more substantive manifestations of humanity such as compassion, consideration or helpfulness. A person knocked down in an accident may lie bleeding to death with none of the thousands of those driving on the road stopping to take him to the hospital.

At the slightest inconvenience, people tend to fly into a rage showering filthy abuses on fellow human beings.

In no time at all, rudeness can morph into violence, and assume a lethal character. It is not uncommon to see honest differences of opinion leading even to murder. Life, in short, has been reduced to a hit-and-run existence in both the literal and metaphorical senses.

There can be no better book portraying the age of rudeness than the one by Lynne Truss with a rather long title Talk To The Hand - The Utter Bloody Rudeness Of Everyday Life (Or Six Good Reasons To Stay At Home And Bolt The Door!).

B. S. Raghavan

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