Rapid acting government workers

You know, not all government workers are slow. There is a group of people I've seen in action who were so quick to act, I thought i was in an action movie!

The side of the street that you park your two-wheeler on in Pune (maybe in the rest of India as well, I don't know) alternates each day. The areas marked for parking have signs labeled  "P1" or "P2". On odd-numbered days, you can only park on the side of the road marked P1 and P2 is for the even-numbered days. I hear this is because they didn't want to just fix one side for parking since the store owners were complaining that their side of the road was getting blocked by the parked vehicles every day.

However, and I don't condone this type of behaviour, not everyone follows these signs. For that matter, not everyone parks in the designated areas. In earlier version of India, this was quite normal. But the municipality workers have become quite strict about enforcing these rules and they immediately grab a vehicle that's parked on the wrong side and take it away in a truck. Especially in the posh localities, like where I work. (I had something similar happen to me when I first came to Pune.) Again, I support this type of enforcement since (I think) it leads to better conditions on the road for everyone.

The action movie-type sequence happened near work a few weeks ago. As I driving down the road I saw a truck come to a screeching halt near a bunch of parked scooters. Two things happened simultaneously. A bunch of guys jumped out of the truck and started running for the scooters, and a guy standing across the street ran toward the same group of scooters. For a second there I thought someone was going to get murdered from all this commotion. Turned out the solitary guy was the owner of one of the scooters and wanted to get to it before the municipal workers could tow it. What I didn't till then was that these guys all came equipped with digital cameras to take pictures of the license plates of the wrongly parked scooters!! The guy was trying to block the workers and they were pushing him aside to get to the license plates! It was like watching the paparazzi trying to take pictures of a celebrity.

As much as I liked the enthusiasm of these workers in trying to administer justic, it just felt like these guys were just acting out their sadistic tendencies by rushing to take those pictures. Also, I couldn't shake the feeling they were just doing this to hold the guy hostage and get some bribe out of him to delete the photos.