Life without kindness

It was a sunny May morning in the early ’80s when a young street vendor from the fields near our village came to sell his fresh watermelons and muskmelons. The fragrance was overwhelming. Melons grow best in fertile, well-draining, sandy loam soils along river beds, with some organic compost added at the time of planting.

Every year, some nomads used to shift to the alluvial plains of Markanday river in Ambala district in the month of February for preparing fields, and sowing watermelons and muskmelons. And who wouldn’t welcome the biggest, yet affordable fruit.

That day, as the hawker parked his bicycle and weighed a piece for a customer, the son of a rich landlord took two watermelons from the jute bags kept on the bicycle and ran away. The vendor ran after him, but the prankster had within no time disappeared and the vendor was left feeling indignant.

Circa 2015, it was a cold and breezy afternoon and we had just stepped out of a restaurant in Chandigarh and were waiting for our driver. A young boy was selling balloons to lovers and young children on the pavement outside. Immediately thereafter, a group of pot-bellied middle-aged men came out, started smoking and approached a paan-wala. The balloon vendor went up to them and said, ‘Sir, why don’t you buy some balloons for your wife and kids.’ But his entreaties fell on deaf ears.

Suddenly one of them lit a cigarette and placed its burning butt on one of the balloons, and then on another balloon, blowing up both of them. The boy was aghast, with his self-esteem, whatever he had of it earlier, punctured. He started crying and asked the men to pay him Rs 20 for the two balloons. They ignored him and drove off without even looking back.

What was it that these two sets of people, in totally different situations, had in common? One thing was that they were trying to assert their self-assumed supremacy over others, with total disregard for the feelings, self-respect and the dignity of the labour of people.

A lesser-known fact is that Darwin’s work is best described with the phrase ‘survival of the kindest’. Indeed, in ‘The Descent of Man and Selection In Relation to Sex’, Darwin argued for ‘the greater strength of the social or maternal instincts than that of any other instinct or motive.’ In another passage, he comments that ‘communities, which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members, would flourish best, and rear the greatest number of offspring.’

Compassion for others has tremendous benefits for our physical and mental health. The act of giving appears to be as pleasurable, if not more so, as the act of receiving. Compassion can be contagious, too, inspiring people to help those below them, something which was not witnessed in these two instances.