I am a size XL and so when flying I ask for a seat on the emergency exit row for the legroom. The cabin crew giving instructions on what to do in an emergency inevitably do a good job. They stay on script, and insist, or at least try to insist, that the passengers fully understand the sequence to be followed.

Unfortunately, their task is like that of teachers in an indisciplined classroom. Like schoolchildren in a boring lesson, Indian passengers usually have zero interest in the evacuation demonstration. Some are playing with their phone, others have their headphones on. I have observed this over hundreds of flights and it is embarrassing how casually this safety ritual is taken. When the flight is about to end, this cavalier attitude to safety is extended as desis make a grab for the overhead bins despite being told expressly to wait for the seat-belt sign to go off. The idea that the moving plane is unstable and it is for our safety and for that of other passengers that these instructions are given doesn’t really register.

A laptop bag once crashed down on my seated wife’s skull, as some stuff from the overhead bin was being casually yanked by a gentleman. Heaven knows what sort of damage we do to each other every day in this Hobbesian fashion.

Naipaul said that Indians drove like they walked. A little bit of brushing against one another’s vehicle was fine (and the evidence shows on India’s cars, none of which is left unscathed) like shoulders in a bazaar. The idea that the motor was a large and potentially dangerous machine had not fully registered. Readers know how casually vehicles back up in our parts, and even drive up the wrong side on highways.

This is the background then to the awful event of this week in Mumbai, when urban Indians became familiar with the stampede. This is usually a killer in our rural parts, where a large crowd, narrow spaces and panic act in concert to account for large numbers of people. We should mourn the dead of Mumbai, but it should be said that they were victims of a culture where safety is disregarded by Indians across class, as the evidence on airlines shows.

In a culture where there is no discipline, disorder can turn lethal quite easily in the wrong circumstances. The West is not unfamiliar with a large crowd in a closed space, like a stadium or arena or hall. The fact that stampedes happen far more frequently in our parts is for a reason.

To blame Piyush Goyal or Western Railways for the terrible happening is unfair. To assume that another bridge, had it been built, would guarantee that people would not die in such events is to not be in touch with reality.

We lost 23 Indians in the stampede. A couple of decades ago, the newspaper I was editing in Mumbai used to run a daily count of local commuters killed while crossing the tracks (rather than taking the overbridge). We did this to advertise the danger of this casual behaviour. The average was 10 deaths a day, a number that always struck me as being insane, and a number that did not significantly change as we kept reporting it. Western Railways did everything it could to try and stop Mumbaikars from killing themselves through unsafe behaviour, but it was running against a culture that was hard to break. Think of the trauma on the poor motormen and motorwomen driving those trains and observing the slaughter through their pane.

In defence of Western Railways I should say that they are proactive on safety of many sorts. The organisation I work for, Amnesty India, collaborates with them on the issue of sexual violence and the safety of women passengers. The numbers in India on this matter are absolutely horrifying. Government data says that 99% of victims of sexual violence do not report the crime. In the absence of strong and continuous engagement from all sides, civil society, police, government and corporations, we will not be able to change this for this generation of women and children and the next.

Our experience with railways has been instructive. Of all the organisations that we have worked with on women’s safety, railways have been one of the most, and possibly the most, receptive and open and willing to look at training and behavioural change. This includes that of their own staff.

Railways are facing enormous pressure and abuse because of the tragedy of Elphinstone Road Station. Much of this ignores good work done in difficult circumstances.

Mountstuart Elphinstone is a great man for Gujaratis. He began the first schools for us, where everyone from all castes could enrol to get a modern education for the first time in history.

One necessary aspect of coming into modernity is a respect for safety rules that secure you and those around you. Indians, all of us, need to take this less casually than we currently do.