A Shameful reflection of human limits!

So it happens to all of us; We all are forced by nature more so by the people & societies of ours ,to see such scenes.Scenes which send impounding blows of dilemma & sorrow,bewilderness down our memory lane.

A similar scene happened one day while Jerome was out shopping with his friend. They had set out to buy new clothes for the upcoming “Summer Carnival”, the grandest of all festivals. Jerome & his friend had specially come to ‘Perune’ to buy clothes for the occasion. The scorching summer heat was punishingly drawing the streets empty & shops were staying closed or semi-opened even in the day.

After hours of selections/rejections, they were finally done with their shopping for the day while the sun still marked 1:00p.m. in the noon.

“Eh Jerry, i want a mango shake.” their eyes turned towards the fruit stall with the board pronouncing

“MANGO SHAKE/

MILK SHAKE/

BANANA SHAKE/

STRAWBERRY SHAKE”

The air was so arid that even the metal board hanging from the rusty roof of the shop was so still.

“Yeah. Lets go. I’ll have a Mango shake.” Jerry prompted as they ushered into to small shop in two leaps over the stairs.

“Pheww! Got some relief.” They turned the table fan towards themselves. Both the boys faces seemed like blanched tomatoes,
red & dripping with sweat.

While they awaited their drinks, searching over & over through their shopping bags exploring their’s days worth of
hard labor. They were simply happy, inconsiderate & unthankful to how much their pleasures of a royal spendthrift
costs their parents. But Jerome was different- a keen observer, a reflector he was rather than an actor, a virtue
which in d modern world seems faded.  Where people acted & reacted more forgetting the vitality of
reflection. A thinker he was, an observer of human behaviors

A lady enter the shop the lady. She was dark complexioned. Her clothes revealed her poor dressing sense & lack of fashion understanding but fashion was a rather subjective thing. Disorganized, she carried few bags in her hands. She was loaded with earrings,  nose-pin & rings that contrasted her loud colored clothes.

By the bewildered look in her eyes she looked as if a sheep strayed into a strange land. It was easy for Jerome to deduce that she must have hailed from a nearby village. In her own quite funny & reluctant sounding dialect, she ordered herself a drink. From the very first moment that she entered, the shopkeeper’s face was overtaken by a stern arrogance & disgust like he was visited by someone unwanted.

Jerome snapped out of his observation by his friend’s annoying slurping sound.

“Stop it!” Jerome said.

& again his eyes rolled back to the shopkeeper & the lady as he heard her complain about  the unsatisfactory glass of juice. She grunted about the juice not being chilled enough. At this she was greeted by an unconvincing & unapologetically rude reply by the man.

“Eh! You see those boys! they too drinking it. Why you complaining? Aah! Its chilled enough.”. But his tone which reflected sheer disgust had said it all.

Jerome though to himself:

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“Why was the lady being treated this way? Even at our worst, he’d never be so rude to us.Then what less had she-a woman, who was rather double our age commit as was misspoken & she absorbed it all. Or did she have a counter argument? 

Why was i encountering such a scene once again? It wasn’t the first time i’d been a sorry spectator to such unavoidable circumstances. Whenever people from the countryside visited my father Dr. Samuels, they were also greeted selectively by my family members. The well dressed visitors from the city were dealt politely & humane unlike the poor ones from the countryside. I could never decipher how it all worked.

I questioned myself what were the grounds for such disparities? Why were we humans prejudiced?

I knew the impulse a different skintone, different race, ethnicity, a different religion,region or caste sent down our nerves that we lost sanity & humane-ity.

How hard it was to talk equal & just, be polite to a man of a lower social or financial status? It was really hard. for they had never encountered  such a situation where they would be victims of any such mental atrocity. For if they had been through the same biasing, they’d never have afflicted others with their unjust attitude.

Did any of those reasons deprive him/her from his basic human need of dignity & respect? We, the Pseudo- civilized are often treated respectfully in our own social circles & when a newer element of the society whom we preconceived as a “lower one” entered our vicinity, We dumped ourselves in the depths of orthodoxically backward & stagnant protocols of dealing with them. We confine & limit our love & compassion & mistreat them, exploit them; hurt their self-respect with our foul behavior just because they’re unlike us.

Eg: We see innumerous people hateful of poor & trapped in color disparity in Indian culture. but they’d gladly welcome a person hailing from the same skin tone who was wealthy & powerful. Does it stand as an example for the social trite “Money & power flows in the direction where it is already abundant”?

They’d readily kiss a rich & famous celebrity with same skin-tone, & claim they favored color equality, but not utter a word of kindness to a poor man of the same color, let alone touching or healing them with a tender touch. They’d never have food touched by such people. Was it not still the same food? A middle class man would act rude to the ones he considered poor. A rich would be hesitant to jell with a lower social/financial class.
On the contrary all such biasing languished when power of money set in. Being rich could break all such social boundaries. One who was rich was never subjected to such discrimination no matter what gender, race, ethnicity, social class, region, religion he/she belonged to. 

To see, per say, i & that lady shared similarities on most social grounds; suppose we had same religion, same caste, same surnames. Then was having a different color, a different financial condition or different gender a valid aspect for this fallacy to humanity; was the shell of better clothes protecting me from being another victim?

Was being just another human not an excuse big enough for sustaining dignity of life.”

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“Come on Jerome, lets go.” His friend’s pat on his shoulder startled him out of his reflection.

The woman was still on her table. Jerome tried to look through her eyes to understand what was going on in her mind. But he dint have to go so deep into her soul as the answers were evident in her slightly wet eyes itself.

 

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