Security Consciousness

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity. (Opening lines from ‘The Second Coming’ by WB Yeats)

After 26/11 we have supposed to have increased security across India. One does see increased police and security presence. And the frisking and metal detectors have now become ubiquitous beyond airports to hotels, malls, multiplexes, clubs and even schools.

However does anyone of us feel more secure? I don’t. Almost everyone I know does not.
What’s wrong?

I believe that while our best security measures lack, as Yeats puts it, ‘lack all conviction’ while those who intend to breach our security when they can, as often as they can are “full of passionate intensity”.

We need to make security an integral part of how we think and how we behave. We need to acquire what Mr Chidambaran called “security consciousness” but left it to our imagination to define.

Modern society and every individual in it are passionately committed to the pursuit of comfort and convenience. As a result, comfort and convenience is the conscious and even sub-conscious objective of everything we design, every system we institute and every pattern of behaviour we adapt.

In contrast to comfort and convenience, the provenance of security is an imposed consideration.

It took decades for the world of business to make safety an integral part of product design. Society cannot now afford to take decades to make security an integral part of how we live.

There are no short-cuts to security consciousness. But unless we start today we will be forced to continue with security measures as they are today forever.

Measures that cost us not just billions of rupees but millions of productive man-hours in time lost to ham-handed inconveniences. Measures that will make our children grow up paranoid. And even after all this cost, measures that can fail anytime anywhere.

Security consciousness is an attitude. It is an attitude like thrift is an attitude. Once imbibed, security consciousness manifests itself in myriad ways.
The other key aspect of security consciousness is that it works in consonance with our other needs. Security that results from security consciousness does not result in loss of comfort or convenience but in fact enhances them!

Let me illustrate this with an example.

For years due to conventional security measures, waiting for your visa interview at the US Consulate at Bombay was a pain. The queue was long and uncomfortable as one waited for long periods at the mercy of the weather.

Then the Americans got security-consciousness. You now wait in air-conditioned comfort in a holding station a couple of kilometres away till your turn comes to get on to a high-security bus that takes you the consulate for the interview and then drops you back.

The experts tell me that the new arrangement is 30% more secure than the earlier one because it does away with the high-risk scenario of a crowd of people just outside the consulate building.

And of course it is 100% more convenient for all concerned.
In fact because the security that results from security-consciousness also enhances convenience, it ensures compliance.

The development of security-consciousness in a society is a multi-dimensional process.

Like all attitude inculcation it is most effective at the school level. Every culture needs to build its own security-consciousness curriculum for its school children because it has to be rich in socio-economic and cultural context. Basic templates will be provided by studying what the Americans, the Japanese and the Europeans do in their schools.

The second fertile area for the development of safety-consciousness is in our professional courses. Incorporation of safety-consciousness in undergraduate and graduate programs in engineering, design, medicine, architecture, administration, management would result in a rapid diffusion of safety-consciousness into the systems that run our society.

The third pillar of a security consciousness build-up would be that mother of all attitude builders- mass media and entertainment.
We all know how mass media can whip up emotions and paranoia. We all know the power of cinema to promote patterns of behaviour.

If mass media and entertainment could sit at a table and agree upon a security-consciousness agenda I believe that Indian media and entertainment has more power and talent than any other country in the world to convert this agenda into an attitude that will be widespread in our society.

In conclusion, I believe, if the world becomes truly security consciousness it will be the second coming of the age of true security. The first, of course, was in the Garden of Eden!

The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? (Closing lines of ‘The Second Coming’ by WB Yeats)