Just because…I believe in the goodness of beings

Even though every single day is rife with struggles and tribulations beyond normal levels of comprehension, adding to it is a sense of disregard and a huge gaping divide; in spite of a series of events that often push one to become cynical and a non-believer, there is, however, sometimes that one event or a string of incidents that invariably make/s one believe in the goodness of mankind.

A brush with a kind and compassionate stranger, who is on the periphery of society himself, trying to eke out a decent living: with meagre means, barely sustaining himself and his family, but with a heart of gold, ready to do a good deed for those less fortunate than him. It warms the heart immensely to see an old woman being fed a hot meal by a road side food vendor: he doesn’t get off a swanky car, wear branded clothes, kick the puppy in the middle of the road, mouth inanities and flash his obscenely opulent hand phone several times in your face, whence you have the terribly primeval urge to hit or decimate him. You try to breathe steady and look for some respite, bludgeoned as you are every moment by such flashy pseudo apologies that call themselves human beings that one odd case of a compassionate person is hard to come by, tougher still, in the hugely cloned environs that we inhabit.

Everyone looks like everyone. Oh! Dear Lord, they sound the same too! You scan and search frantically, for that one extraordinary feat ever so relentlessly and around the bend suddenly the very mundane, the very ordinary becomes unbelievably extraordinary: when an auto rickshaw driver goes the extra mile and doesn’t charge you for it, as he had taken a wrong turn by mistake. No amount of argument to give him his due convinces him, forcing him to retort, “Because of a few people who are greedy and those who fleece, we have earned a bad name, and we are not all the same.”

One sits up with a start, jolted, yanked out of the zombie like reverie; one sees uniformly boring and often constipated faces with the same grins, the same flashes, the same food, the same issues; sameness being the disease and suddenly, a remedy, in the middle of nowhere,  an ordinary goodness of a being, restoring faith and sanity.

But that is not all of it; the heart of gold is nearly always ensconced within layers of difficult commonplace tragedies, trials and heartbreaks. Some derive immense relief by assuaging the pain of others, some do it to wash away sins of a previous lifetime, and some do it just because they believe that it would create a ripple effect somewhere in the here and now effecting a change in eternities.

An old man sits across a rickety table, stooping as he reads prescription after prescription and guides the illiterate patients at a government hospital, he even helps them to make their bills and procure free medicines. He himself is frail, almost a shadow of what he used to be physically, but his heart and soul are evolved enough to realize the need to do unto another what you would unto yourself. Hundreds of unknown faces, a distant look in their eyes file past him every day, hoping for a better tomorrow, he helps them better their today. He has been doing so for as long as he can remember.  

And then you have the false speeches, the promises that are meant to be broken, and the rash and pseudo nationalist fervor being drummed up at every nook and corner of the country, once in every five years or so cosmetically changing just the crust, while the evil politicians walk home with a heavier kitty and emptier hearts and souls. In one such corner a young tribal girl sells insignias of almost all the parties going to the polls, a chat with her reveals, “it doesn’t really matter who comes to power as we will remain where we are, even then,  but now at least we are being fair and supplying a variety to people to choose from.’’

If only this didn’t leave a putrid taste in the mouth, if only the heart didn’t shudder at such astute perception, if only the so called country of tolerance and good deeds hadn’t got usurped by diseased minds and pimps, if only there was some respite from this mindless power play and more focus on just the goodness of being or the goodness of beings, if only we weren’t overtaken by such avarice, if only…

© Copyright Suverchala Kashyap