Bangalore Talkies: Infighting in apartment complexes

One of the lessons that this virus has taught is about normalcy. One person’s normal is another person’s outrage. This gets compounded in a residential community that can only enforce norms, not laws

This tiny virus has taught us many things. The illusion of control that we all thought we had about our lives has now been irrevocably shattered. It has showed us the extent of our own fallibility and how the rivers and animals that we once viewed as sacred and since desecrated with mutate and fight back in ways that we cannot even imagine.

Shoba Narayan. (Sourced)

Who knew that a potent combination of a wet market along with the Chinese penchant for eating wild things could unleash this beast upon the world.

The learnings will continue as the world emerges from the virus. Social distancing has created emotional distances and the mental health issues that will ripple out are hard to know or measure.

For me, one of the lessons that this virus has taught is about normalcy. One person’s normal is another person’s outrage. This gets compounded in a residential community that can only enforce norms, not laws. Requests, not rules. In 1620, the French polymath Blaise Pascal said, “People are usually more convinced by reasons they discover themselves than by those found by others.” This applies to norms and rules surrounding this virus?

How has your community dealt with social distancing? Are all of your friends and neighbours on the same page? Not so in my community.

Bengaluru in May, 2021 had the dubious distinction of being the top city in terms of active Covid-19 cases. In mid-May, we had close to 600, 000 active cases. As the city administration faltered, most apartment communities had to come up with rules of their own. And this is where the variety of responses to rules was on wide display.

Take my own community. With 64 apartments, we are not especially large. During the lockdown imposed by the city government pretty much all through May, the volunteer committee that runs our building complex came up with what they thought of as a fairly sensible rule. They banned maids, drivers and other external service people from entering our community. This, I must add, was the norm in many large gated communities in Bengaluru. What happened was a display of the Indian mindset.

Indians, as a rule, hate to be told what to do. This isn’t a uniquely Indian trait. Most people don’t like to be dictated to. The difference is that Indians are very creative and imaginative when it comes to breaking rules. Worse, they think that rules apply to everyone else except them.

When maids were banned in our apartment, many of my neighbours who I thought I knew came up with novel ways to circumvent this rule.

One spirited the maid into the basement in her car and into her apartment. Another fought with the security guards every morning, heaping abuse on them for preventing her maid from entering.

A third announced that she would take responsibility if any person entering her home infected the community. This was the opposite of an idle threat. This was an idle responsibility.

There was no way that this lady would take charge of our building in case her maid infected the rest of us. In the 1950s, social psychologist Leon Festinger came up with what he called the “theory of cognitive dissonance.”

Humans hate to hold two thoughts that are in conflict with each other. So the household that cannot do without maids does not like to hear from their neighbours that these maids are carriers of infection. Their response – to double down and insist that they are right and the others are overreacting. The same applies to parents in a school, workers in a factory and employees in a company. How to protect a community then?

When you have to rely on good faith and social norms to influence good behaviour, it becomes an exercise in persuasion. In India, social distancing is an alien concept. Our homes have fluid boundaries with people coming in and out.

During Bengaluru’s lockdown, there were families in my community who decided to do without all help: no maids or drivers. And there were families who simply couldn’t do without external help. How to get these two extremes on the same page?

In the birdwatching group that I am part of, there are members who believe that going for nature outings is okay as long as all members wear masks. And there are others who believe that such gatherings are very risky. Each to his own may work in normal circumstances but not when you are steering an unruly ship.

Values are a nebulous thing. What might hold strong and true for you might seem strange and shifty to others. Do you eschew all outside food or do you order in and say that you will support local businesses? Both views have merit in this situation. Do you gather outdoors with a few friends or not? Do you vaccinate or not?

What seems to work is the well placed question, the suggestion without aggression. As Abraham Lincoln once said, in order to persuade people, you have to first befriend them. If it worked for a man who had to heal and bring a country together, why not try it in your community?

Shoba Narayan is a Bengaluru-based award-winning author. She is also a freelance contributor who writes about art, food, fashion and travel for a number of publications