Born equal

Everybody is born equal. Right?

You won’t agree, there is , you will say, enough evidence to prove I am wrong.

Just look around you, you will add. Look at the kids with bare bottoms crawling about dangerously close to the road, just outside your office where you sit in air conditioned comfort; and when your workaday is done, from where you go back to your home in a car that joins a stream of others in what is called a typically traffic congestive evening in an Indian metropolis!

So, how can you say everyone is born equal, you ask.
I grant you your point of view, bow to the evidence. But hold my ground.

Everyone is born the same, I repeat.

The surroundings might be different, the circumstances different, but if you look at the baby, the new born who comes mewing into the word, bald, bare and sometimes beautiful, there is nothing in what you see to tell you whether it will continue to mew piteously through the rest of its life or suddenly realise it has the power and ability to roar.

Not the baby’s antecedents. Not its lineage, caste, creed, family name, or circumstance can tell you anything about what destiny and its own invincible Will, will carve out as its path of life.

So there is the crux of my argument. Anyone is the sum total of what he or she does with what life presents him. Which explains why some who are blessed with opportunity in the form of wealth, education, you name it, end up becoming nothing more than a nuisance to society, whom we would rather forget ever existed. On the other hand perhaps someone with nothing , not even a family to his or her name, rises above the mass to shine like a beacon of achievement, or inspiration.

But we choose not to understand this any more. Once a person was known by the good she or he did, the lessons of life they shared, and the community benefits that they brought about.

Today, such acts are not seen as of any consequence.
Not that there is any dearth of inspired people doing good work. But they remain unnoticed, unsung, and unless they are happy being instruments of change without thought of reward or recompense, they tend to give up their ideal and let the goal they set for themselves vanish from sight.

The real heroes in today’s lexicon are those who succeed in visible ways. In  ways that they can show to the world, in terms of what they collect around them. Material gains, symbols of wealth, sychopants and hangers on who believe they will get some rub off from the icon they hang around. Wealth attracts wealth, power builds power, the edifice of those who aspire to such never stops growing. It is a bottomless need that fuels the tower of their gains.

If only, we as humans would realise that watching the lives of the rich and famous will not really enrich us in significant ways, we would be the better for it.

Instead if we stopped for a moment to find the quiet workers among us, the ones who put service before self, who work for the happiness of those lesser blessed than themselves, who believe in high thinking and down to earth living, we would be a more evolved species.

But then, this has been a cry in the dark through the centuries. Was it not 300 years ago, in some long forgotten mood that a poet named William Wordsworth mourned the fact that ‘The world is too much with us!’