BW&Gray
Surely, there is so much gained from the glorious process of modern development, but let’s also do an inventory of the losses. Let’s start with the highly alarming cases that has an all too heavy undertone of social malaise made worse by an aggressively urbanizing trend in motion.
A mindless homicidal trend, it seems has exploded in the society with all the pent-up energy of a time bomb. Consider these incidents peaking on the crime graph.
A 32 year old man was stabbed to death by his cousin, a 27 year old in the course of an argument on Tuesday. The suspect is believed to have a history in using illegal substances.
A 50 year old taxi driver was found murdered brutally alongside a stream on the way to RTC in Thimphu, his body riddled with multiple stab patterns. It is potentially confirmed that a wrong turn in a taxi fare negotiation sessions is the reason for the deathly outcome.
Another 50 year old man is dead after he is hit by a Maruti Alto in Paro. The driver who was driving under the influence (of alcohol) was detained by the police.
And there’s the homicidal murder case at Central Plaza where a 29 year old man was killed in cold blood and then thrown off the balcony of the five storey building. The incident was the first to be called a ‘clear case of homicide’ by police. No points awarded in being the first, but it has certainly spiraled things in motion.
The deceased was a child of divorce and generally hopped from one relative’s to another’s, and had no fixed address in life. He was also in the past detained by police in a drug abuse case.
Divorced parents, drug-abusing child, late night partying youths (good lot of them heavily drunk, or intoxicated with this and that substance), reckless drivers flouting road rules, drivers drinking while driving, jobless youth with no productive avenues to invest their excess time and energy – its all a web of events that eventually germinates the social ills in a long line of robberies, gang fights, drug abuse, murder cases, suicides and broken families.
Roads spread from east to west and north to south, automobiles big and small decorate the highways while buildings tall and grand keep growing in numbers. The concrete jungle flourishes with all its tributary elements, but in the middle of all these, people become less and less sensitive to each other; communication becomes more and more disembodied (with gadgets replacing people).
Safely said, everyone needs to perform better, as at the authority and policy level similarly at individual household levels.
Published as column for Business Bhutan on June 27, 2015
BW & Gray or Black, White & Gray is a column published in the Business Bhutan and solely tagged with the pieces written by this Author.
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