Compassion And The Indian Man

Are we walking away from the lessons that we learnt years back as a race – the lessons on compassion and benevolence? FHM explores...

- Siddharth M Joshi

A man walking on the road early morning is hit by a tempo. The traffic signal CCTV footage captures a stranger stealing his mobile phone that lies a few metres away from the fallen man. All this happens over 90 lazy minutes, at the end of which the man dies, bleeding on the road, unattended, as hundreds of people walk by. The edited version of the video makes it to social websites and our minds, and gains a filthy viral status for half a day.

Another man loses his wife to tuberculosis in a district hospital in Orissa and is denied an ambulance. He carries her dead body on his shoulders for 12 kms. This becomes an online sensation that is also widely covered by all popular news channels; stays in news for two days and gets archived in the library of Indian history, never to be pulled out again.

These are two among a million examples where our brothers and sisters, as the national pledge recounts them, have failed on the primordial duty of a human being. The argument gets perplexing because East is supposed to have pioneered in and championed the concept of compassion long before the West made peace with its several reservations and survival wars. And like the intermingling of water and land in the natural history of the world, it somehow exchanged sacks — us having renounced the idea and them having embraced it in absolute reversion.

WHAT CAUSED THE REVERSION?