A Little Bit of Warmth
I never understood the fascination for the Big B. What do you mean Big B? Big as a Bee? While the country prays for his health and worships him, not many are willing to extend a little care and warmth to those who do not enjoy the same advantages as the rest of the biggies. I am just taking one among the many incidents I have witnessed on my way to work. I am sure there are other innumerable incidents that are far more tragic, but have never made it to the papers or the television, possibly because they are not Page 3 material.
Coming back to my story, as I was standing at the over crowded bus stop waiting for some mode of transport to get me home, I heard a voice a little farther away from me asking for help to get into a particular bus. When I followed the voice, I realised it was a blind woman who wanted to get home, but needed a little help getting into the right bus. No one volunteered. No one cared. People were too busy taking care of their own little world. The only other person who wanted to help out did not want to wait too long because he had to get home too. I felt terribly bad and sickened by the apathy of the public. I stayed back and put her in the bus and headed home.
I am not trying to say that I am kind and considerate, point is, why can't people take on the same sense of responsbilitiy towards others who could really use their help. You are taught about success, money and the big life, but what about kindness, empathy and sensitivity?
A world class citizen perhaps?
Worse still, people who already have enough money just keep getting more and more. Shah Rukh Khan is supposedly getting 75l per episode of KBC, Ice Queen Ash demands a crore or less apart from euros from her 'well wishers', Sania Mirza and Sachin Tendulkar may not be the master of thier games, but they make enough money through endorsements, but what do they do in return?
Comments
Once, in a bus, a woman tried to "help" me by offering to hold my bag. Later, I discovered that she flicked my purse and the money in it. Now, I don't trust people who want to help me. So, should I help help others? Of course I say. But it's a bad bad world we live in.
god bless your kind deed to the visually impaired person that day - i am sure such small acts of kindness wil be remembered a long way to come...
we are, through the educational system that we have borrowed from the west, conditioned to believe in certain paradigms of 'success'. today, we tend to look at life in the same eyes as the west does - in a very materialistic manner. what i mean by this is that anything that can not be 'measured' is banished as non-existent.
as a result of this 'money', 'power', 'physical comfort' and so on have gained paramount importance in our eyes. when such becomes the case, people want to go after money, no matter what. nothing else is more important that money. consequently, i do not think of 'wasting' my time doing anything 'unproductive'.
am also taking the liberty of disagreeing with afj here...just because one freak incident proved a loss in terms of your wallet, i don't think we need to stop trusting people. trust is the backbone of human existence. it is b'coz nobody trusts anybody that makes us say things like u did -
"But it's a bad bad world we live in. "
one other way to look at it is - whoever stole your wallet, must've needed it quite badly, to have stooped down to cheating u in the manner she did. that we, we don't carry too many bad feelings.
atul - mutually exclusive, yes, but not always so, don't u think? i mean thats what usually happens, but its not that it has to be that way...