Opinion Two policemen, and what their actions say about a bruised Insaniyat in India

Switch scenes. We are in India at the Mumbai airport. My husband and I ask a policeman seated in a chair if the lift will take us to the cab pickups. “Can’t you read the signs?” he shouts, baring his paan-stained fangs.

As a child, I was often driven through the Aravalli hills from Udaipur to the village of Gogunda, where we have family land. The regular halfway stop was by an old temple in a shaded valley crossing Choron ki Bawari (the well of thieves). I hardly remember seeing devotees at the temple, but it always had two matkas of cool water placed by the road for a weary traveller. I still remember its earthy smell. I remember my mum telling me it is sawaab, a good deed, to offer water to a stranger. My father spoke of how “shram daan” (voluntary contribution of labour) was not an oddity but a norm when he was growing up. The clinking of steel tiffin boxes exchanged between fellow passengers on a train. The first roti at home being made for the gauriya in the garden, the little grain-eating sparrow that has spread with human civilisation and agriculture in the last 10,000 years. A bird we understood we had to take under our wing.

Insaniyat — that golden, nameless mix of humanity, decency, empathy and shared fate — wasn’t a slogan or a social media campaign. It was in the muscle memory of our civilisation, our tehzeeb. Like the air we breathed. Free, vital, and taken for granted.

Today, it seems, we’re all running out of breath.

Not only Pali or Sanskrit, insaniyat is a dying language in our beloved nation. We in the cities no longer stop to check if someone lying on the street is alive or dead. In a nation obsessed with gods and godmen, we fail to recognise the godliness of humanness.

It’s not just the viral videos of road rage or communal hate that mark this erosion in urban India. It’s in the little things. Take any Indian city. The honking can give you damaged eardrums and high blood pressure. The first reflex when someone trips is to stand around and watch, or worse, take out your mobile and film. When a calamity like Covid strikes, some decide to stop paying the maids, the poorest of the poor.

How did we get here?

Perhaps, the answer lies in the daily thrum of stress, competition, fear and alienation that our cities breed like mosquitoes in the monsoon. When survival becomes a sprint, being humane becomes a casualty. We have seen it more with the burgeoning of the Indian middle class.

Perhaps, we grew too big, too fast. We built too many flyovers and too few bridges.

Perhaps, the decibel level of a new brand of national pride is drowning the softer notes of our syncretic collective conscience.

Perhaps, we are teaching our children how they are unique in this whole wide world, a universe in themselves, but not teaching them how to co-exist with others who are just as unique. That being a universe doesn’t mean being the centre of it.

Living in Sri Lanka for the past few years has been like stepping into a time capsule. A place where the security guard of your area can just come riding his bicycle, ring the bell and request a cup of tea. Where a tuk-tuk driver, with his weathered hands on the steering handle, smiles and tells you to keep the change. A place where, when a natural calamity strikes, each household comes out to help.

This is a country that has suffered war, a tsunami, debt, an economic crisis and the resultant political instability. And yet, amidst it all, they’ve managed to hold on to the things that make recovery possible: compassion and a quiet civility. What is most pervasive in Sri Lanka is the culture of smiling. When was the last time we, in India, smiled at someone on the street?

Then there’s Bhutan — India’s quieter cousin with better karma, with an official Gross National Happiness. When was the last time we saw a nation officially care about how content its people are?

Of course, these countries are neither utopias nor “developed” as India dreams to be. But what they haven’t lost, yet, is their emotional infrastructure.

Our hearts were filled with warmth when young people in Chennai formed human chains during cyclones or when Guru ka langar fed more than 1,00,000 people daily during Covid. If we want to be a world leader and stir the centuries to come, we must not treat insaniyat as an exception, but as the national character. In the end, it will not matter how many smart cities we build if we become emotionally homeless.

Insaniyat in India is not dead. It’s just badly bruised and occasionally ghosted. But like all lost things — be it your childhood toy or your idealism — it can be found again. Not in mandirs, mosques or manifestos, but in how we treat a tree, an animal or a person who can do nothing for us.

It doesn’t need a revolution. Just a few daily acts of kindness, without expecting likes, comments or applause, would suffice.

Arefa Tehsin is a Colombo-based writer and environmentalist