A trip to my native place- Kerala, this summer proved to be quite an eye-opener. It wasn’t just a sightseeing trip. It was a month of what we call as ‘happy realization’, the realization that the people of Kerala could do with some more of genuine hospitality instead of the plastic show-off, the painful understanding that my kith and kin be a little more sensitive and less callous.
Picture this. One fat man sits on a wooden crate by the roadside- probably sight-seeing. Beside him, another man smokes a beedi, with one leg propped up on the wall behind him. A scooter comes by, loaded with cardboard boxes. As it just passes these men, one of the boxes fall down. As the poor rider gets down, hauls the scooter onto the stand and comes to pick up his unlucky luggage, the smoker and the other man do not even flinch as they stare at the box and its owner alternatively.
And they say Mumbai is the rudest city! Each city has its own cultural mix, mannerisms and spirit. What the Mumbaikars miss out in their day-to-day life, they make up when there is a crisis. Remember the deluge last year? Did the Reader’s Digest see the spirit of Mumbai then? Did it see how people helped each other and made them feel comfortable even as they spent three days away from home?
There’s no reason to create such hullabaloo over such an incompetent research by Reader’s Digest. Arcopol Chaudhuri, a BMM student in VES College, Chembur, says,
"I believe in individualism. You cannot generalise a city's manners by studying certain examples. Survey and research studies results are published everyday in journals the world over. Why make a big fuss over a survey?"
Space is what we need here. External space. Space inside the minds, to facilitate cloudless thinking. Do we believe in what the survey said n agree that we indeed are uncouth and rude? Or do we be what we are and do what we have always been doing? Let us all be good Samaritans and direct lost people onto their destinations, help disabled people cross roads, hold doors open or chairs ready fro people and never forget to say the magical words of “sorry” and “thank you.”
