For the greater good?

I reached the IIT gate in the morning the other day only to discover that cars were not being allowed inside by the Delhi police. The police being the police in India, they did not see fit to divulge the reason to me and all the other people who were being turned away from work or even suggest another way of getting into the campus. So I drove on straight to the hostel gate and mercifully was allowed in. I had to park my car quite some way away from office inside the campus. Everybody who works/lives in IIT were discomfited that day as they had to take pretty circuitous routes to their places of work as most of the roads had been blocked by the police.

Of course it was an easy guess that the Chinese premier who was on an India visit would probably visit IIT sometime that day; which he probably did since all the security vanished in the afternoon and normal life resumed.

I cannot still however form on opinion on the fact that one man's visit should put so many people to trouble. There must be at least two thousand students in IIT and a few hundred staff in addition to the families of the staff members who have their residences inside the campus. A significant proportion of this number, quite probably the whole part of those who ventured out that morning on some work, would have been inconvenienced by the elaborate security arrangements. I would have thought that the police's job is to provide security with as little problems as possible to the ordinary public. However, time and again, it is the ordinary people who have to suffer every time some important person plans to go somewhere. And I refuse to believe that a risk-weighted importance of the VIP should outweight the troubles of so many ordinary men every time.