The Ball of Guilt

I am tired enough not to get done with my Things to Do. But, I am not tired enough to recount a peculiar incident that happened to me on a bus journey. 

I was engrossed in my book Amritsar : The Last Battle of Mrs Gandhi. I was trying to create a mental time line of the events that led to the infamous Blue Star and subsequently the assassination of Mrs Gandhi. I was brought back to the cacophony that prevailed in the bus by a tug at my elbow. 


The tug didn't beg.The tug chided. 


A young man ( displaying obscenely conspicuous signs of being a Hindu) was motioning me to scrunch and let an elderly hunchbacked man sit. I obliged. The elderly man, before he slumped onto the seat in obvious relief, asked me twice if it would not cause me any discomfit. The question caused much more discomfort than having to share the seat.

The incident touched a chord somewhere. Are we too engrossed in our academic pursuits to pay any heed to the real problems that our world faces?

But, you know what made me smile? The elderly man was a Muslim. Notwithstanding all the rhetoric RSS or Maulvis might generate, in a mofussil town there is a(n apparently) devout Hindu who chides an urban boy for not letting an elderly Muslim sit on a crowded bus.

It might be unfashionable and politically incorrect to use Hindu/Muslim as adjectives in secular societies. However, a lot of us acknowledge religion and still manage to be secular.