something today

An incident not of much significance and much common place but i am writing it down so that it acts as a reference so that if me or someone else reads it he pays attention.

Today I saw a boy around 14-15 passing by near my house and crying loudly.He was carrying those sweet cottons in his hand to sell.It was strange to see him cry as we are expected to see these people with an only straight faced expression and never show any emotion except perhaps something crying out abuses.Also we expect them to be toughened by life and so never display any weakness.I had never thought about the characteristics of these vendors but these thoughts came up spontaneously as I saw him cry and almost expected that some boy moving behind him was crying who belonged to one of us as such tenderness is a privilege reserved for only an elite few.

Moved as any common man i asked him what happened.Before he could answer a gang of small kids who were following him jumped in between.They told me that some thugs had stolen all his money and some of his possessions.they explained me how did fooled him.They also told me that how they were helping him by giving him 10Rs each.And they asked me to give it to him as well.based on my belief that helping people like this only frees you of the guilt for time being and actually saves u from the effort of doing something concrete i did not give him anything right then .

Meanwhile bawa also came in and asked what was the matter.that bunch of kids again excitedly repeated the whole story.Bawa was equally helpless.he asked if he could identify those thugs.Since he could not so he also raised his hand.He asked me to give him 10 Rs.I thought of giving him some more but then decided against it.Meanwhile Mummy was not entirely convinced of the story.

Anyways the whole lot moved ahead and i decided to follow them partly by the desire to give him some more money without being seen by anyone at home and partly to know what would be the boy's response as the kids had taken it in their hands to compensate for his loss and were excitedly calculating how have they made up for him 190 Rs of the 395 he had lost.I wanted to see for my own curiosity that how the victim would behave.I thought that the normal human tendency would be to except the help and show your plight to everyone to get help which i myself was not able to consider as a worthy thing to do.

Still he was in considerable pain and continued crying although now my mind was not able to decide whether he was crying out of the pain or to get sympathy from people to get money.

He did stop or rather was stopped by the kids at another home from where they solicited age from an old lady.I changed my path thereon not wanting to look intruding into the things.

I then was with my thoughts and found that the sympathy of a human being depends on how much he perceives the pain of other to be real.As now i had doubts about his pain my sympathy for him declined.Though i didnt give him the money not for this reason but because still i had the belief that by helping in bits and pieces one tries to exonerate himself of anything concrete he should do for society.