Win-win situations, peace of mind, and other first-world luxuries

It’s been the perfect weekend.  A beautiful drive through tea gardens, misty mountains, and remote canals.  After finishing up a light lunch at a luxurious resort, we piled back in our rented van to start the drive back to Dhaka.

We’re on a winding country road heading back to the highway. We came around a sharp bend quickly and found ourselves on a collision course with an oncoming lorry filled with bricks. Luckily for us, he swerved and dented just the back of our van.  But unfortunately for him, the other side of the car took the brunt of the impact when he hit a tree, shattering the windshield and badly damaging the front side.

Both cars stopped, and our driver got out. A worker in the other truck jumped off the back and began to howl in agony while gripping his hand, not unlike the professional soccer players do when trying to convince the referee of foul play. The other driver was angry and on his phone, making calls. The police happened to be heading our direction, and stopped when they saw what’s going on.  Locals started congregating as well.

A few minutes later our driver hopped back in the car, and we started to drive away. 

“Where are we going?” We asked. 

He said, “They said that we could go.” 

That was easy. For about five minutes, anyway.

We’ve barely gotten a mile down the road before the police overtake us on the motorcycle and cut us off.  The police are shouting at our driver now, and if they look angry, the driver and workers from the lorry pulling up in an auto-rickshaw are positively rabid.  Suddenly I am acutely aware that we are really in the middle of nowhere.  Young men are arriving from different directions, including a lorry filled with men in the back.  The lorry driver is getting more and more aggressive and the yelling is starting to escalate to physical threats.  I hear that the road ahead of us has been barricaded, so there’s no way out.

I’ve seen accident scenes before, and they always look chaotic.  Usually someone is getting pummeled.  Sometimes cars get burned too, depending on the circumstances.  Justice will prevail: pay up or suffer.  Local muscle makes the rules, and is ready to enforce them as needed.

In one sense, we’re lucky that three of us are white and obviously foreigners and the police were on the scene. Our presence is enough to make the police want to keep things peaceful and avoid violence. They were angry with our driver because his decision to flee the scene has stoked the anger of the other driver, who belongs to a local union, and they've worried about losing their control over the mob.

We’re also lucky that we are part of a huge organization with staff everywhere. We make a few phone calls of our own, and soon we've got a few people on the scene that can help keep things under control and get us out of there.

At that point, the police suggest that we leave and just surrender the driver and the car to the mob. It’s clear that some of the workers are calling for blood, especially the one who has “hurt” his hand, and we’re not keen to abandon him in that situation.  So we agree instead that a few of our local colleagues will manage the negotiation with the police and truck driver about the accident, and let us know.  With that, we do leave the scene and head back towards Dhaka.  The van is silent for the next hour as we are all contemplating what we just experienced.

Fast forward to the present, a few weeks later:

The damage turned out to be a couple hundred dollars. Everyone got a piece—the police, the local politicians, the union, the truck owner, the driver, and the “injured” worker who had to go to the hospital.  Our driver, meanwhile, has amnesia about the accident and claims it didn't happen. Our options for recourse are fairly limited—he’s self-employed and part of a rent-a-car network. We didn't sign any sort of agreement or fine print before taking the car out. The company told us if we want to file a case against him, we’re welcome to. The reality is, there’s really no easy way to file a case, and much less actually see the case go through, without bearing expenses much more than the original damage. Many people suggested that we have someone else hire the driver and his car, and then beat him up. Justice must be served, after all.

I’m filled with an overwhelming sense of relief that we just got out of there in one piece.  There are a lot of very plausible, alternative endings to that story that are much less pleasant.  Ironically, when we were leaving Dhaka on this trip, I'd been talking about the flawed dichotomy of "government interference" (i.e. regulation, policies, laws) and "personal freedom."  Perhaps in my next life, I joked, I'll set up a camp to "cure" people of libertarian ideas.   It will give them what they want--a place with very limited regulation.  So that they can see what life is like when you have to filter your own water (easy enough), worry about food adulteration (but mango with formaldehyde is so tasty), buy medications of dubious nature (placebo effect is pretty powerful, though), face emergencies without "911" support, and all the other mundane things that become more complicated when there's no regulation.  To a certain point, regulation creates personal freedom to know that someone else (even big brother) is providing important protections, so that you can focus on creative thinking, learning, and pursuing dreams instead of all the little things that could kill you.  We can argue about where that "sweet spot" is, but to depict "regulation" as control and "non-regulation" as freedom is to marginalize some important truths that most of the world experiences every day.

Who thought I'd ever be longing for car insurance and all that fine print that Hertz makes you sign?  Yet here I am, because actually in this case, at least it would provide a process and a system to handle this situation.  Otherwise we're essentially back in a jungle, using good old fashion violence to solve problems.