I see good people

I take a bus to my work every day. It's not a bus actually, a mini-van instead. There are no conductors on these vans. The passengers' compartment is at the back of the driver's seat and people enter and leave through the hind door without passing near the driver, and so they don't have to pay the fare before or while entering. Yet nobody forgets, or pretends to forget, to pay his due without the driver having to ask for it. The passengers seated right behind the driver's seat perform the job of the conductor; collecting the fare from all the passengers and passing it on to the driver and passing the change back. People from all classes of the society travel in these buses, sitting right next to one another, and doing that service to one another without discrimination.

In the morning when I reach my workplace, I take the stairs to my office which happens to be on the second floor of the building, and usually there's some senior professor leading me by a few steps. We exchange greetings and start a mild conversation. In the middle of the staircase, we chances upon a young helper/sweeper, and the professor never fails to stop and pass some kind remarks and to wish him a nice day. My colleagues at work are a bunch of friendly and courteous people. Most of them would help me out in the problems I face in my work from day to day without ever asking for a return, when it's in no way obligatory upon them. After work, I sometimes visit a park near my house for a walk, or go to the market to buy some grocery, and I find helpful, genial and humane people all around generally.

I visit this web forum almost daily from work. and I see most Indian and Pakistani interactors lusting after each other's blood. They are some wild altercations going on everyday on one board or the other, and it seems that these people won't spare each other a breath if they ever met in real life. Yet when they do meet in real life, they get along as if nothing of that sort ever transpired between them. If one of them is ailing, is apparently in a dangerous situation or has lost someone near and dear, they'd forget their differences and would make a note to be the first ones to show concern, say a word or two of sympathy and send their wishes and prayers.

It's no utopia I am living in, and all these affectionate and cordial, familiar and unfamiliar people I meet are not typically well off in their lives. It's a mediocre country economically and most of the people have plenty of grievances with their individual lives, and yet for some reason the fundamental goodness in them prevails. The picture, however, takes a 180 degree shift when I turn on the TV and tune into a news channel. Quite on the contrary to my everyday experience, nothing but evil seems to be prevailing throughout the world. And that's when I start wondering if it is the evil hidden inside every human being that comes to surface as a collective entity under certain circumstances or if it is just the genuinely evil lot of people that's dominating over the rest. Whichever it may be, what betrays me is the understanding why and how does so much of goodness let so little of evil overwhelm? If it is the apathy of the good ones letting the evil ones dominate, then isn't apathy the greatest evil of all? I like to think of myself as a good human being with courtesy and compassion as my second nature, but when I look around and analyze this paradox of sorts, I tend to lose faith in myself and am compelled to believe that my humaneness just stems from the good circumstances I am in. I don't know where does the threshold of the conversion of my overall goodness into overall evil lie and I have no control over it.

Perhaps this is the very purpose of human life; to struggle to heave that threshold higher and higher, to know absolute goodness from relative goodness, and to shun the latter in favor of the former.