Column

We punish law-breakers, but offer no incentive for doing everyday good

A wonderful story got lost this week amid the coverage of India’s invective-littered victory in Australia, and the attentive reporting about the thorny exchanges between Hillary Clinton and Barrack Obama. Cricket was great, and the presidential contenders from the US Democratic party often come close to using gaalis that could make Bhajji look like a benign satsang preacher.

Anyway, the story I was referring to concerned a boy who had been abandoned by his family and who has grown up in an orphanage in Dongri. Now the boy has grown up into an extraordinarily kind young man. He earns Rs5,000 a month by running odd errands, and here is the unbelievable part of the story, he spends almost all of it to feed stray dogs that have been his friends for years.

Now, a typical tale of difficult childhood – years spent searching for compassion and ducking brutality – often ends with the subject either being reduced to emotional rubble, or being primed to inflict terrifying hurt to society.

But the hero of our story, in my book he is a real hero, chose to repay his undemanding friends’ kindness and companionship. Does our society, our city, have a place for people like him?

We have jails for people who break laws, asylums for people who do not abide by our arbitrary notion of sane behaviour, borstals for difficult kids, most of whom have never had the chaperoning parental affection. In short, we have built spaces for people who don’t fit in, in some way. But those who do fit into our effete categories of humanity are still excluded unless they are like us. That often means being middle-class, with middling wealth and education, and owning a little budget-bracket car.

The charity of Bill and Melinda, or indeed that of Warren – the original universal donor – is easy to remember, curiously because the dollar numbers associated with their charities are so difficult to memorise! Any trivia that comes from celebrity orbits is a grand stimulus to our ordinary lives. And as for people like the orphan who show unheralded humanity, we won’t even care to retell his story – unless he turns out to be a serial killer. Or a rapist with wine-goblet signature, or some such fatuous oddity that can offer us a talking point to redeem our boring day.

I wonder if Mumbai can take the lead in creating what the management types call the exemplary model of change. That system does not focus on identifying and changing the negatives of a company. The exemplary model relies on acknowledging the best run units of a company, and then making departments across the organisation adapt the unit’s strategies and attitudes.

That way, our city can devise a system of rewards and encouragement to our dog-loving hero, to those who don’t litter, to those who never jump traffic signals, to those who never pay bribe, to those who never take them…

If the inducement to do good is higher than being indifferent to morality, a lot more people may lose the incentive to break the law or to be nasty humans. I once asked my colleague how he manages to unfailingly hold doors open to people behind him, and he said: “My brother met this hot babe that way.” There, the exemplary model of change!

raghu@dnaindia.net