Little good left in the world?

Easier to pick out the bad orange in a basket than a good one

I wonder if good people are rare now or they’ve always been such cans of caviar.

         I’ve been suspecting for a while now that perhaps the world might be getting worse than before. Slowly but surely, the mines of humanity are drying up - the very humanity that distinguishes us as superior beings in this seemingly self-styled winning position we’ve built for ourselves. There has indeed been a growing wonderment in me, of whether there’s any good left in the world at all. I am itching to know your take on it, bonny.

         A rather hedonistic approach to life lately, I know. About a week back, I had hit the gym around six in the evening. There’s a table in one corner where people leave their belongings - bags, keys, or such, you know. I did too - my key bunch, water bottle, and phone shrouded in a blue case with specific blackened corners from ruthless overuse. After quite a while of wanting to tame my distractions, I had decided not to touch my phone for the entire one-hour session. When I did go to collect my belongings at the end, though, my phone was missing. I didn’t sweat. I was certain it would turn up soon enough. The gym is inside the society I live in, and the society has been more than decent to me so far over the course of my six-month-long stay. To think of foul play inside my head even - silently, would have still been a ridiculous notion.

So, like a logical, faithful human being, I took a stroll around the gym to ensure it wasn’t indeed my slippage of habit that led me to pick up the phone somewhere in between my session and mindlessly leave it around an equipment I was using. So dubious I was of my screen addiction that I was certain I had broken character without realizing it and forgot about the whole thing. I checked once, then twice, then a third time before giving in to the suspicion that maybe my phone wasn’t in the gym any longer. For a minute, I wondered if I left it back in my flat, but no, I could recall checking my phone while entering the gym. I asked a few people to call it to no avail. It was ringing, but there was no answer. A small part of me began to stare at the inevitability of the phone being taken away by someone who had probably mistaken it for their own phone. After all, so many phones were crowding the tabletop.

         I called the security guard and informed him of the situation. Clearly in need of eyewitness evidence, he insisted I call my phone right in front of him, going as far as to offer me his phone to make the call. Luckily enough, this time someone answered. Some middle-aged man from one Karol Pharmacy that I have neither heard of nor visited in the last twenty-three years of my life. By now it was evident to me that someone had picked up the phone by mistake and that someone had travelled to the Karol Pharmacy. Only salt in my cake was, why did that someone just leave the phone there? Why did he not come back to return the phone back upon realising it wasn’t his?

          Why not rectify a simple human error?

          My main concern at this point, however, was to retrieve the phone. With no means of conveyance or communication of my own, I ran up to my flat to ask my flat mate if she could drive me to the pharmacy. It was only ten minutes away, but the night had deepened to 9, a treacherous time territory for a woman with no phone or personal vehicle in the midst of our pious, sushil Bharat. My flat mate wasn’t in. All the other acquaintances I had within the society were either out of town, cunts I didn’t speak to any longer, or ones whose flat numbers I had never bothered memorizing. Stuck in this pickle, I asked the administrative staff of the society if they could arrange some help. They offered to book me a cab, provided me with a number I could call in case of an emergency, and sang a dozen apologies for not being able to dispatch themselves of their duty to drive me to the pharmacy.

             Amidst this chaos, I spotted a junior from my college coming out of the gym. He was the one who had lent me his phone initially to call mine, after recognizing me from campus. I requested him to chaperone me. He agreed, although a little awkwardly. I don’t think the poor guy had such a helpless demand from a senior before. The pharmacist verified my identity before dispatching the phone since there were conflicting claims on it. He offered to show me the CCTV footage of the man who had brought the phone into the store. I was elated. I recognized the man from the gym - a martial arts trainer to a society kid. He had appeared well-spoken and decent enough the few times I saw him in passing. In the footage, I could clearly see that upon fishing out two phones from his pocket instead of one and realizing that one of them isn’t his, he puts it on the counter discreetly and slides away from the situation securing no accountability.

By this point, I was fuming, entirely absorbed by the indecency of this one man and carrying this on to categorize the entire human race as a group of regressing animals. I was consumed by the thought of how little this man had going for himself if he didn’t even have a smidgen of integrity to right an honest mistake that could have been made by you, me… anyone. I kept cursing at this Armageddon of a time we were living in, wondering where it is that goodness went. Why was it so hard for this man to just come back to the gym, keep the phone in its place, and save a person all this trouble of being robbed of such an essential, basic necessity in today’s world. On my post-incident rant with my mother, she walked me through how I was fortunate that the man had only left the phone intact over a countertop instead of throwing it away or destroying it to get rid of his mistake.

According to her, the man was probably afraid of being harassed for a genuine mistake because of how unforgiving people have become nowadays. She insisted that instead of being hung up on the frustrations, I should be grateful that I at least found the phone. I couldn’t help correlating this phenomenon to the arrogance of bare minimum humanity that demanded praise in today’s world. It is almost funny to me how something so perplexingly straightforward has so many man-made complex layers. Isn’t it basic? You made a human error, you at least try to rectify it. That’s what decent humans with basic fundamentals do, right? They try to be good, do good, see good.

     Yet, it was rather late that I found myself mentioning to those listening to my rant about how good it was of the security guard to help me with such personal initiative. How good it was of the administrative staff to offer me a helpline call, to book a cab, and apologize profusely for being unable to accompany me. It was, in fact, most kind of that junior to drive me all the way to the pharmacy despite the fact that I had only been introduced to him that very day, that very moment. All of these were rather basic or slightly above basic human decencies, and yet it was so much easier for me to look past them and focus on the lack of it. It is much easier to pick out the bad orange from a basket than it is to pick out a good one.

       Since decency is supposed to be a trademark humane quality, it is easily overlooked. It’s obvious. Spite becomes rather prominent against the backdrop of humanity. It outrages us, shocks us, stupefies us where good deeds earn ever so slight of an approving nod. At least that’s how I think the natural course of events should have been. Yet, we live in such a funny time where the country goes bonkers over politicians building roads, partners being loyal and men not raping. So, I think I am rather happy taking a bit of time to acknowledge a basic human decency before calling out a obnoxious human indecency.

        Even though some say, it takes a good person to see the good in people.