The desolate street was quiet except for sounds of squealing brakes and rhythmic squeak of vehicles hurrying towards destination. Otherwise crowded with street vendors in daylight, sidewalk of Narayangarh was occupied by two souls walking briskly towards Rewa lodge. It was around midnight when me and my brother reached guest house only to find that no rooms were available for the night. My twelve-year old heart was hopeful that the owner would manage something out of empathy for two desperate kids in front of him. However, the hope didn’t last long.
The cool gust of wind on the street was doing little to enchant us as our thoughts were racing to figure out the situation. In the mean-time, my brother who is three years older than me asked,” Can you walk all the way to home?” After a momentary pause, I just nodded my head in agreement. Though I accepted the idea of walking almost an hour bus ride distance, I had some serious doubt if my legs complied with the decision. Fortunately, after walking about a mile distance, we met a good Samaritan who offered us hot food and a place to stay.
Despite my incapacity to comprehend the sheer joy that rippled through me at that moment, now after ten years I genuinely believe that particular incident is a reminder that humanity is not extinct yet. It may not be everywhere, but it still exists in some parts of the world. Humanity, a character of homo sapiens, which should have been a normalcy is so scarce these days that every once in a while, we see some viral videos with caption “faith in humanity restored” on social media. Two hundred-thousand years into modern human civilization and we have progressed in every other aspect except humane behavior. As a matter of fact, it is high time that we reinforce love and compassion and get rid of greed and delusion in order to propagate humanity on this fine dust particle suspended in the vast cosmic arena.
In the perspective of good samaritan, he had just helped two kids in need but in the big picture he had inspired us to be loving and compassionate of other beings around us. Love and compassion, the foundations of humanity help us become passionately caring and giving. We may have misconception that only grand donations and huge sacrifices fulfill criteria of humanity. No, Not at all. In fact, our true nature of giving and empathizing with others resonate with philosophy of being humane. let’s put ourselves into other’s shoe. Let’s share what we have with who don’t have. Let’s engineer ourselves to be more giving and less expecting. If we are able to do this bit only then we can identify ourselves as human beings in a true sense.
Humanity is like a chain reaction which spreads relentlessly once it has begun, however, all of us should be willing to start it first. While speaking of spreading humanity, it is easy yet not so easy because we have delusion of having special privilege on earth. For instance, we fight wars and create boundaries between each other because we believe that we deserve a better place than others. To clear this false impression of ours, Stephen Hawking once said,” when we see the earth from space, we see ourselves as a whole. We see the unity and not the divisions. We are here together, and we need to live together with tolerance and respect.” Hence, our ideologies should sprout from respect and tolerance rather than from divisions on the basis race, caste, class etc. if we are to spread waves of humanity.
In addition to that, with time is growing our desire to achieve material success, earn money and relish power without us realizing that it is growing at the expense of generosity. Unfortunately, our society is being built on antagonistic foundation of greed and it’s interesting that each of us think we are not greedy but everybody else is. It is natural to be acquisitive, however to a certain limit only. For instance, the total wealth of the world belongs to only a handful of people while billions of people are struggling for hand to mouth existence. In order to expand the scope of humanity, we have to detox ourselves of greed. We need to put kindness over cleverness and we need to think little and feel more.
Overall, humanity can be mushroomed in a greater scale by bringing love, compassion, generosity and reality together in our everyday life. After all, it is not a Herculean task to restore its normalcy in our perfectly imperfect world.
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