Pests of Criminality in the Love Crop: Apathy

 

Helen Keller: “We may have found a cure for most evils; but we have found no remedy for the worst of them all, the apathy of human beings.”

The moment one succumbs to apathy, one surrenders a considerable portion of his/her loving self. To nurture our indifference, we feign ignorance many times. Allowing the bug of apathy to bite you is an open invitation to get caught in the quagmire of stinking mediocrity. It robs you of your chance to be great in your own ways because no greatness is complete without a kind, considerate and loving heart.

Leo Buscaglia: “I have a very strong feeling that the opposite of love is not hate - it's apathy. It's not giving a damn.”

The best in you is unfortunately buried under a layer of apathy. It needs to be dug out. Changing the world means basically changing our own self. Look outside and you find it the most daunting task. Look within and you find the key.

Handle apathy, and you can avoid the creeping bugs of skepticism, which will definitely save you from becoming a cynical being. After that nothing matters too pointedly to burn your self in agony.

And now for a clearer picture, look around. Beware, murderer and robber are just an arm-length away!

Long before we see outright criminals, there is a low intensity, almost intangible process at the mass scale that eats into common psyche, facilitating mass apathy, boosting millions of transgressions. It makes an individual careless of his step, as long as it helps in reaching the perceived objective, and so many times this tiny step carries the massive effect of spoiling someone’s journey altogether.

Feeling lucky not to have come across a real-life murderer with blood-ridden hands and a dagger in hand? Feeling at ease not to have faced a robber, with muscular barrel chest, eye-patch and devilish beard running away with yours and others’ money? Well think again for you might be grossly mistaken. There are murderers and robbers on the prowl around. And in far more numbers than you can ever think even in your wildest of horrifying imagination.

There is a lot more violence hidden under masks than you see in actual battles, street quarrels and brawls. Fire of hate on the surface may not actually give clue to the smoldering heat under the surface. 

It can be your sheepish looking, harmless milkman, holding the potent weapon of slow death over the years. Yes the milkman with his passable crime, with little doses over months and years. In India the fight for self-survival is so brutal that poor milkman won’t flinch an eye before mixing urea and adhesives like Fevicol to make adulterated milk. It breeds death, slowly over months and years, with no sign of a murder committed. To the milkman all that matters is a successful day with all the pots empty and sold out. What happens later is none of his concerns.

It can be the sweet-tongued sweet-maker pampering your sweet-tooth with an affable smile and still honeyed words. Yes the sweet-maker with his shortcuts to profits with fake milk derivatives and cancerous chemicals and colors. And there are many, as many as you count the sweet shops, except for the few moralistic ones. India is crammed to the guts, and the mere struggle to survive, at any cost and through whatever means, justifies the end to get more bucks in the wallet.

It can be the poor-looking harmless fruit vendor. You even end up having sympathy for him. Little do you realize that the fruits you presume to add to your life are in fact cutting into your days. Their expertise to survive the cutthroat competition lies in artificial, cancerous, chemical-catalyzed ripening, waxing on the surface to make stale fruits look fresh and scores of other devil-devised machinations to get some more bucks at the cost of disease and destruction in others’ livers.

These are the murders on the safer side of law. Nobody dies instantly. Death comes slowly. It’s a visibly causeless disease. Nobody can be blamed. They vend out poison slowly, in mild doses. They add a day to their survival at the cost of years from the lives of those whom they serve.

There are robbers around as well, in clean shirts and socially respected avatars. Law cannot touch them because they don’t rob outrightly like the condemnable criminals barging into a bank and running away with the whole vault of money and gold. They do it in slow sips over years, as invisible cogs in the corrupt machinery. In both governmental and private institutions and departments, these legalized robbers sit on their desks with an affable smile and clean slate. It’s facilitation money. The extra money has to land invisibly into their pockets to move the process stuck at their check-post.  

Then there are countless petty criminals and transgressors, stomping their way to their destination at any cost. It’s an ant-swarm. Law never looks more impotent than in the face of such brazen frequency, everywhere, every moment: spitting, urinating, defecating, shouting, molesting, eve-teasing, raping and countless other forms of violence from the mildest to the heinous most. It makes it seem as if the rulebook is just a draw of lots for all the criminals around. Only a few are unlucky to get their name taken out as legal offenders. The rest clap over their luck for being left out.  

So there are murderers and robbers all around. And law cannot sneak into each and every soul to arise either fear or conscience to think of injustice done to others’ in the struggle to survive. Poverty and greed make a person too thick-skinned to be sensitive to the world beyond the self. The only option is to hope for a generational shift when more people will be aware of the issues beyond the limited self. Don’t you think we need to have the topics of kindness, consideration and civic sense in our curriculum?

Unfortunately with the Indian population ever-exploding, and more people fighting for diminishing resources, it seems a dream to visualize a society where the milkman, the fruit-vendor, the sweet-maker, the government officials and rest of the horde will become humane enough to be self-responsible and follow the laws even if there is no apparent risk of getting caught.

Law-abiding instincts get honed over a period of time. It’s like stopping at a red light on a totally empty road, in the depths of night, with absolutely nobody around, and no fear of punishment, but you still put up breaks, and smile. It gives a strange sense of contentment to be self-responsible for such tiny transgressions. Just looking forward to a day when majority of the Indians will come out of the pit of self-obsessed survival and be self-responsible not just for their own existence but for others’ convenience as well. 

Considerate individuals make a loving society where you at least take care of your fellow journeymen’s interests, or at least try not to stomp over neighborly feet. In this manner, we can avoid a stampede at least. With our little caring outlook in traffic, in parking lots, in bazaars, and everywhere, a small rectified step is far more effective in changing the system than you believe. If you still have any doubts about the effectiveness of your considerate, caring step, which in effect mathematically add to loving kindness, then I take some time to narrate an Arabic story.

A fire broke out in a city. Everybody was running around to salvage as much as possible before escaping to safety. From the wealthiest to the poorest, from the strongest to the weakest, all appeared in a mad frenzy to take something more from the pits of fire. A small sparrow but was seen scurrying back and forth between a pond nearby and the burning city. It would take a beakful of water and drop it into the fire. A powerful man saw this and laughed, “O little sparrow, when the world is burning, and so high and mighty find themselves helpless to do anything, what will your tiny drops do?” The sparrow said, “It might not mean much to the fire, but on the day of the judgment I will have the freedom of saying that I did what I could.”

Well, I don’t think we need to say more on this to emphasize the point.