The Hindu : Unfeeling community

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Aug 20, 2002

Opinion

Opinion - Editorials

Unfeeling community

INCREDIBLE BUT TRUE, Indians are cold and unfeeling. Indeed, a lot many of them are. There were five compassionless cowards in a Mumbai suburban train coach when a drunk — and probably weak — raped a mentally deranged 12-year-old girl the other night. The men looked on with shocking stupor and mindless passivity while the child was brutalised. There were perhaps tens of people outside a Chennai cinema recently when a young girl was teased, taunted and traumatised by hooligans, who were incidentally college students. The girl's friends and a lone policeman could do little to stop the outrage, but had even a few among those waiting to get inside the auditorium made an effort to stop the crime, the boys would not have dared to terrorise the girl. However, the people there that day chose to be mute spectators. Such gutlessness is not rare; rather, it is the order of the day in a society which once boasted of courage and valour, which did not tolerate crime against women and severely punished those guilty of committing atrocities on the weak and the defenceless.

Obviously, Indians have slipped into a terrible, dark existence, where values such as compassion and concern have ceased to matter. Service to a fellow human is service to god, wrote an English poet. But let alone service, the average Indian does not even help when the next man or woman is in sheer distress and agony. How many of us would actually help the blind to get across a street safely or lend a hand to the aged? Not many, one would presume, and the number of such people willing to shoulder societal responsibility is shrinking with frightening speed. There are very few who are willing to be involved in a neighbour's misfortune. There are very few who would step out of a crowd to crush an anti-social. There are very few who would stop by and rush a wounded man to hospital. One remembers the tragic plight of a Chennai college girl who lay trapped under the wheels of a truck for an eternity before someone from the group of onlookers decided to give her medical attention. But, by then precious moments had been lost, and the girl's leg had to be amputated. The larger Indian community appears cold and callous in the way it treats its have-nots: otherwise, how would one explain the way mentally ill are tortured. Chained and locked away for life, most of them have little hope from a people, self-centred and selfish to the core.

Sadly, Indian society suffers from an "I" syndrome. As a commuter summed up aptly after the Mumbai incident, "as long as it does not affect one, he shuts his eye and mind to what happens to the man next to him". This is the kind of selfishness that infests our lives today: where the will to live is driven solely by the motive to earn, where the next man's sorrow and suffering matter little. Look at the way highly "educated" people seem oblivious of death when they talk about business and stocks over their mobile telephones in crematoriums. Watch the almost hostile attitude towards the aged and the infirm, often treated as social outcastes only because they have ceased to be productive in a certain sense. The recent "sati" is perhaps a classic case of this. Ultimately, this wanting in community can be traced to the absence of enlightenment in education, which seldom stresses factors such as harmonious co-existence and consideration. There is little effort to highlight the joys of a community whose larger and lasting welfare can be only guaranteed through mass participation. After all, if happiness is infectious, so is sadness, and no man or woman can walk back home without remorse after being a mute witness to tragic cruelty.

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