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People and society by
Hari
Posted on Wed, Mar 29, 2006 at 22:09 IST (last updated: Wed, Jul 16, 2008 @ 21:16 IST)
Some time ago a very innovative enterpreneur started a car manufacturing company called Monopoli. It was a revolutionary idea at a time when cars where only driven by the elite few and the rich of the country. This company actually introduced cars that could be driven by the man in the street. It created a revolution in the transportation industry by allowing a majority of the people to own cars. For a while Monopoli were hailed as great leaders in the industry and received a lot of accolades.
Soon this company reaped rich dividends and became a major player in the Automobile industry. Soon they had a great idea. Why not buy the roadways as well so that they could control the entire road transportation system? This was exactly what they proceeded to do. They slowly bought up all the major roadways in the country and started extracting a road tax from all the citizens for using the roads. Now, not only did they own most of the cars on the road, but the road as well and using their control over the roads, other automobile companies started feeling the heat. Their cars were not allowed to run on the streets without a fee, but Monopoli's cars were freely allowed. This led to a decline in sales of other cars. Many of these automobile companies actually tried to take action against Monopoli, but they failed miserably. Soon Monopoli was virtually king of the road. Although quite a few people avoided paying road tax by sneaking through the bylanes, Monopoli were not unduly concerned by this development.
But what Monopoli didn't realize was that over time, people started getting frustrated of paying road tax to Monopoli. With rapid strides in technology, they had other choices which became much cheaper. Like Air Travel. With such a wide variety of choices, more people started travelling by air, therefore avoiding paying road tax altogether. There was a small section of people who preferred deluxe rail travel, but this was such a small segment that they really didn't bother. But the Air Travel was really worrying them because more and more people were using Airways because the roads started getting bad with more potholes.
Monopoli found the costs of laying and maintaining the roads increasing by the day since the traffic involved was huge. Monopoli found their road business a serious worry because the road tax wasn't bringing in enough revenue to keep patching up the potholes on a regular basis. And the people were also starting to grumble that their cars were running up a huge maintenance bill thanks to the bad roads. The only way Monopoli could survive was to increase the road tax, but this was such a move that could only drive away more people to using Air Travel. Monopoli were in a big fix. How they now wished they had never entered the road business and stuck to fighting out the competition in the automobile business. Their bills were starting to rise slowly but steadily and even though they were still in control of the roadways, the general sentiment of discontent was a worrying sign. They tried their best to make people stop using Air Travel by publishing campaigns like "Air Travel is Dangerous" and "Planes Get Hijacked regularly" and such stuff. But people knew that hijacking was a relatively rare phenomenon in certain Airlines because of the high level of security they maintained. And besides they knew that certain highways were always dangerous to road users because of bandits on the loose. At several stages Monopoli even tried to outlaw Air Travel by using their power but it failed miserably. Not understanding the airline industry, Monopoli were at a loss at what to do about it.
Where will this story head from here? 
4 comment(s)
Comment by thennavan (visitor) on Thu, Mar 30, 2006 @ 09:32 IST #
Comment by hari (blog owner) on Thu, Mar 30, 2006 @ 09:58 IST #
Comment by Dominic (visitor) on Thu, Mar 30, 2006 @ 16:11 IST #
Comment by hari (blog owner) on Thu, Mar 30, 2006 @ 21:27 IST #