Three Degrees of Seperation

The Indi Patriot:

( now on twitter @theindipatriot)

Monday, September 16, 2013

Three Degrees of Seperation

Yesterday, my wife was doing an assignment for her studies for psychology. We were talking about compassion. Somewhere in her research she hit upon a basic distinction of the degrees of feelings we have as follows:

1) Sympathy is when you feel for someone’s troubles, to move them from a de humanized image to a conscious one. (So you would sympathize with lets say a beggar child)

2) Empathy is when you do something to feel an emotion close to what the other person is feeling. (So empathy is standing in the hot sun talking for a few minutes to your fruit seller and consciously feeling what he goes through)

3) Compassion is when you do something to alleviate someone's suffering after you sympathize and empathize with them. Compassion by definition encompasses action (So compassion would be opening a food kitchen for people who live on scraps since you feel for them and want to take some action on that feeling)

So that made me take a stock of my life and I looked around me and I was shocked to see how many ghosts there are around us.

People I haven’t noticed in my self centeredness but without whom a city like Mumbai will crash.

We go around calling ourselves compassionate when we haven’t even touched the sympathy level with them.

These are people who live and work around us but we never even had eye contact with them. We would never dream of reaching out and talking to them, of understanding their troubles. We are too busy zipping by them engrossed in our lofty dreams and self importance.

We have dehumanized them so much they don’t even enter our peripheral vision in a lot of cases.

I had sort of grazed on this subject in my article about street sweepers, but this time I thought deeper on the subject:

The first person of course I thought about were these street sweepers. The silent angels who are busy working by the side of the road in pitch darkness while you whizz by in the silent cocoon of your car taking for granted tha t the same road will be clean when you pass by the next morning.

The second person I thought of was the water control men. What most of us dont realize is that Mumbai still runs on archaic water gate systems which controls your water supply using large iron keys. You may see these valiant key men switching on and off your supply in the middle of the road struggling with heavy 3 feet high iron key while we turn our cars to bypass them but we never acknowledge the contribution they have on our water supply.

The third person i think of is our ATM security guards. You may recognize your society guard or even the guards of the buildings you visit since they imping on your consciousness by interacting with you. How many of us even notice that there is a human being sitting outside the ATM we use as we brush by them.

The fourth are the scavengers : I always say that India has the best recycling system in the world. Throw an aluminium can or a scrap of paper on the road, 10 minutes later its history. Who took it, the scavengers. It is said Mumbai creates approx 10,000 tonnes of wastage daily dumped into disposal sites. Imagine how much more it would be without the scavengers. The beggars barge into your life making sure they are noticed, the scavengers are the silent warriors who go about their tasks with no intrusion into your mind or consciousness

The fifth are the gutter cleaners. We pass by them in our cars, see them covered in black muck, stinking, cleaning the gutters manually in in human conditions unlike any other country which calls its self a developed civilized country.and uses machines for at least he primary cleaning

The sixth are the local train drivers. We interact with the TCs and maybe in a rare occasion with the guard but how many of us even see that ghost who drives the train, who comes onto the platform quietly, goes to his cabin, does his job and goes home. The person without whom Mumbai’s lifeblood would come to a screeching halt.

The seventh is the security guards who frisk you at Malls. These people are the backbone on which security in crowded places rest. They run their beeping wands over one after another after another ad infintum. We dont even bother to make eye contact and smile at them. For us they are as lifeless as the metal detector that we pass through before we reach them.

These and so many many more people who are the lynchpin around which our lives revolve. I have sworn the next time I meet any of them, the least I will do is make eye contact, smile and let them know how grateful I am that they make my life comfortable. Who knows maybe I’ll be lucky enough to drop my ego  and share a cup of tea with these noble silent soldiers. What will you do ?