The Big Fat Angry Moslem

I chanced upon a fight on the street two days ago. The word "fight" is a bit of a misnomer here - it was too one-sided to call it that. When I reached the scene, there was a small crowd of people looking-on. In the center of the action was a young lad of about 14, two older men, in their late 50's, and a plumpish woman of about 40. It was around two in the afternoon, and tempers seemed to be as hot as the burning sun overhead.

One of the men, a fierce-looking Moslem gentleman with a gray beard, had caught hold of the boy's collar and was soundly berating him in Hindi. Expletives were flying out thick and fast from the man's lips, most of them bearing upon the boy's suspect parentage and his maternally incestuous tendencies. The lad was silent, and I didn't blame him. Two scooters were parked next to them, having a role to play somewhere in the drama, I suspected.

It was hard to gather much information out of the yelling. In fact, once you removed the cussing, there wasn't much else left at all. But I figured, not unreasonably, that the young boy had been riding his scooter too rashly and had crashed into these people's vehicle and was now hearing it for that. Of course, the fact that the boy was the one driving rashly was merely a surmise on my part, and it could well have been the other party's fault all the way.

One thing was fairly obvious - the chastising wasn't going to stay verbal for long. A couple of passers-by stepped in and tried to pacify the old man. "He's just a boy," they told him. The man refused to listen to any such talk. He raised his arm and tried to smite the young chap a blow to the head. One of the other men managed to stop him in time though.

Up to this point, I had thought that the woman was with the two men. But now she grabbed hold of the young boy and pulled him away, yelling something at the two men at the same time. She herded the boy in front of her to one of the scooters, which they then rode away on, with the boy riding. As they were leaving she threw one final retort about how she was surprised that the man could use all these "nice" words while wearing the Moslem prayer hat.

The man, for his part, wasn't too pleased about the sudden exit of his young foe. He still looked red enough to explode, and for a second one might have thought he would catch one the onlookers and complete his tirade on him instead! But somehow the guy who had intercepted and the man's companion managed to calm him down enough for them to get onto their scooter and leave the scene.

I left too; with some stuff to think about. Was the boy old enough to possess a valid driver's license? It didn't look that way to me. The number of children that drive around in this city without a license is sizeable. Fewer, but still alarmingly plenty, are the number of children that drive with licenses that were illegally procured. (Because they aren't old enough, for example.)

From experience I know that a few of these young turks drive extra cautiously, for fear of getting into unnecessary trouble should they get stopped by the police. But a lot of them sit at the other extreme. For them a two-wheeler is something they've just discovered, and they ride it with gay abandon. Legally, their crime is driving without a license; morally, it is driving rashly, and thus endangering the safety of others. Which one do you think is more important?

Then of course, there's the other point of how a man in his 50's can be allowed to hit a young boy in his mid-teens. I think it's wrong. Heck! I know it is. But one could always argue that if the adolescent thinks he's old enough to drive (and apparently his Mom thought so too), then surely he should be old enough to face the music. He was as responsible for the "accident" as anyone else. So why should he be allowed to get away now by pleading "too young"?

Moral of the story - makes no difference how old you are, drive safely! (And stay well clear of angry, old Moslems!)