Demonetisation makes me hang my head in shame
I sat watching TV discussions on the two shocking instances of public apathy that surfaced one after the other. Two parallel episodes of fellow human beings - one in West Bengal and the other in Tamil Nadu - dropping down dead right under the noses of people, and both dying abandoned in broad daylight.
In both instances, all bystanders and bank officials (in the TN instance) are seen pursuing their routine work as though nothing has happened.
Expert panelists on TV shows were seen wondering why, in spite of the Good Samaritan Law (the spirit of which none of them had, admittedly, any clue!) being in place, no one was forthcoming with help.
The Good Samaritan Law, emerging from a set of guidelines evolved by the ministry of road transport and highways (MoRTH) in response to a directive from the Supreme Court (October 2014) attained legal status in March 2016, via an order of the apex court.
The overall sense of the law as declared is that persons volunteering to help victims in distress (in most instances, victims of road accidents) should not be harassed by the police or malicious litigants.
The law, it is important to note, does not oblige citizens to respond to human distress. It only offers protection from likely harassment to those who respond. It should not be confused with the “duty to rescue law,” which requires of citizens to offer assistance to those in dire straits and holds them liable, if they fail to do so. The distinction between the two concepts is lost on most people.
Consider what it means to act as a good samaritan. Our interest here is neither religious nor legal per se. It is, instead, to seek clarity on an issue of extreme importance, where confusion prevails.
The law enables us to behave like good samaritans. How can we do so, no one asks, if we do not know what it means to be one?
Let us not think of Jesus of Nazareth, for the time being, as the founder of a religion; otherwise, we will not be able to think clearly in the present ambience of religious allegories.
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| We are in a money jungle. We are singularly focused on cash. |
Why did Jesus create the parable of the good samaritan? [Interested readers can look up the Gospel of St Luke, chapter 10, verses 27-37. It can be accessed on the net.]
The core purpose of this parable was to expose the negativity of the Jews and to urge them to be positive and proactive. A few contextual facts are essential at this stage.
The Jews were not unlike us! Hating non-Jews was an essential aspect of being a Jew. They divided humankind into Jews and Gentiles. Among the Gentiles, the Samaritans were to be despised the most. They were relapsed, degraded, depraved ex-Jews.
As a rule, the closer you were to each other before you became enemies, the bitterer you are as enemies. The intensity of the present hatred is a measure of the intensity of the love that was.
So, when intense Pakistan hatred is preached as a national virtue, I smile; for I know that it bears sad witness to how close we were. I give full credit to Modi for having tried to build bridges. Sadly, Pakistan is stuck in a dark hole.
True freedom is the freedom to make a new beginning. We must, as humane Indians, lament over the evaporation of the principle of freedom from the Pakistani psyche. In my humble submission, they deserve pity. A militarised nation is not free to be human. It is a grim truth as relevant to the rest of the world as it is for Pakistan.
Hating Samaritans was deemed a nationalistic/patriotic duty for all Jews. A Jew was not free to feel for the pain and distress of a Samaritan. It would have struck no Jew as inhuman if he found a fellow Jew gloating over the distress of a Samaritan or of all Samaritans. He would have been hailed as a true patriot!
This explains the power of the parable of good samaritans. It is not about wayside charity. It is about removing the inner block from human mind in respect of all that inhibits and suppresses compassion and fellow feeling towards those who are different or unrelated to us.
What haunted me most about the two events under reference is the complete disconnect between the dying individuals and their “neighbours”. By the way, the word "neighbour" means, literally, near-dweller. Whoever is near you is your neighbour. You have neighbours wherever you are, and hence a duty to respond to them in their pain and peril.
Try to decode the mindset, the disposition, the outlook of the bystanders in both instances, including the bank officials, of whom no one says a word. If anything, their apathy is more condemnable than that of the customers.
They failed scandalously in respect of client-provider relationship. What is the meaning, one wonders, of the phrase, “bank on”? To what extent can we bank on the banking system, when it is run by heartless robots like these?
How will anyone respond, allow me to ask our TV experts, if there is nothing within, with which to respond? If the total system we have developed can produce, as TS Eliot says, only “hollow men" - men without hearts, feelings, and inner energies - how can you expect anyone to respond?
Responding to the needs of a fellow human being involves an expenditure of energies, which is precisely what we don’t have today. We have just that much energy to reach our mouths and noses. We have not grown enough to stretch our hands towards another creature. Our hands drop limply even before we try.
A quarter century ago we, as a nation, threw overboard what was an anaemically humane culture, in which we could grow up nourished and subsist at least as BPLs (below poverty line) of fellow humanity. Then we joined the developmental rat race.
We ran well, with all our might. And, in the process, we became rats. Champion rats, all right; but rats, nonetheless.
Rats, whether they stand on the podium or lie writhing in front of ATMs, are only rats. So when the time comes, we too shall drop down like rats. We live in a fool’s bubble if we expect, given what we have done to ourselves, Florence Nightingales to emerge, like in a fairytale, and attend to us when our knees buckle, we stagger, our heads spin, and we gasp and drop like stricken fleas?
Think not that law will take care of all our problems. Law can, at best, only prevent evil from erupting. Law cannot force anyone to be a better, compassionate, human being. Law has nothing to do with your heart. Of course, we need laws; but we need more than laws.
That is the message that jumps at us from these events.
The demonetisation process, for instance, could have been pursued with a heart, or with a caring attitude. No sensible person can have any objection to black money and corruption being targeted.
No, we are incandescently grateful. But the fact that a goal is worthy does not mean that its implementation needs to be a near holocaust! But let that be...
As someone who has been in the domain of education for over four decades, I hang my head in shame. The present system of education is a crime on humanity. It can only produce the likes of the young man, seen in shots and tea shirt in the West Bengal episode, walking over the dead body of his “neighbour” stretching himself towards the cash counter. That is not a visual. It is a parable in itself.
I am worried, worried no end, about where we are headed. We are in a money jungle. We are singularly focused on cash. A beast of prey too is focused on its goal: that of capturing another animal. No tiger will stop the chase, because another tiger is in distress. Call this concentration or apathy or what you will. Argue, dispute, spout nonsense for as long as you have energy for. But...
You will know what it really is only when you are at the receiving end. But the pity is that you will not live on to tell the tale. And so it will go on...
The same spectre will stalk us in all states and UTs of mera Bharat mahan.