Desensitised, Dead

We talk too much. We talk too high. This is the peculiarity we all possess. Many of us may be reluctant to accept it. But it remains ‘our’ irrefutable reality.

There are so many little things that reveal our trait as ‘talkers’ and not ‘doers’. There is so much gibberish in our demeanors. We are all great actors. We just keep leashing out big talk, big philosophy, and big outlook. It is all swathed in a grandiloquent performance we keep giving all the time.

And what stumbles out of this grand drama is the ‘big attitude’ that we lack so miserably. Isn’t it amazing that we fall away so easily in small matters? We prove to be only loud-mouth senseless lot who do not know what it means ‘to act’. Are we desensitized to the hilt? Or we are simply dead?

While searching for some news on the internet, I came across an unusual story from a few years ago—the miraculous escape of Mushtaq Ahmad, whose car was struck by a prowling black bear on the city’s outskirts. As reported, Mushtaq was driving down to reach back his home during evening hours, when the bear popped up before his car and hit it with full force. His car was damaged, and he could not move any further. Mushtaq recalled that fear gripped the area as the vehicles, which were behind him, after a brief halt at once sped away. “I was left all alone on the road as all the vehicles, which were behind me fled away in no time… All I remember is that one of the drivers shouted towards me ‘Hey bear has run away, now you too run’,” Mushtaq, the travel agent recapped.

The words “I was left all alone” define the pitiable helplessness. It reveals our collective character. ‘Run’! Yes, we are all good runners. We run away and run so timidly. It connotes we are all skilled in fleeing away, leaving people in lurch. We just take the flight. We never dig our heels and hold on. That is not in us. That is not us.

In medicine, ‘desensitization’ means reducing an abnormal response through therapy or medication. Sadly, the same has crept into our social lives, people are becoming desensitized to normal human reactions of care and empathy. What should spark compassion now meets silence. The worry is not survival, Almighty Sustainer provides for all. But in a dying society, this collective numbness is hardening into something almost irreversible.

That’s why some people, the “learned eggheads” among us, cite the compassion fatigue as the reason for such indifference. But it cannot even serve as a plausible excuse, for lack of concern about desolate people surrounding us. If we can extend ‘rambling kindness’ ad nauseum, there is no point seeking refuge in ‘exhaustion’ of real compassion for others. And how can it be? We have rarely drawn from our reservoirs of compassion, though we keep draining the stockpile of shallow words. We have been all along so stingy in this regard. Had it been not so, we would have found ourselves in a different condition today.

Few weeks ago, a mentally sick and badly crippled young man was lying down on a road outside the crowded city market square. It was sweltering hot and he was half-naked, motionless on the fringe of macadamized road. As pedestrians and vehicles whizzed along, nobody bothered to pick him up and place somewhere on the shady walkway. Even as he urinated there and was about to be crushed by a moving vehicle, not a soul gave a damn. It was only when a Samaritan, on request of few females around, assembled some people and put the crippled person on the walkway.

What a people we are! Our mentally retarded and physically challenged people lie on roads like dogs. Their families, the concerned official machinery, if any at all, and the general people—we all stand there to be shamed and cursed.

All this going, we don’t cease to talk. Again vainly. We don’t cease to put on airs. Again brazenly. The muck in our brains and the filth in our deeds, continues to suggest that we better hang our heads in shame or just bury ourselves deep in gutter. That is the best refuge for people like us. For highly ‘self-righteous society’ full of noisy ‘intellectuals and leaders’, it seems to be the best place of abode. For decay. For death. For oblivion.