To Save a Life..

We watch television, we watch the news being played on and on about genocide, WMD, suicides, bomb blasts and what not. Some of us take the second look to the total number of people killed. It’s like a toll race… ‘yaar 40 hogayee subha tak tou 35 thay’. We become so indifferent to the gore images being played on the TV like we never felt anything. As if sympathy is dead, as if humanity never touched us. Why? Why can we look at people killing each other, riots and public property burning and our remorse only goes as far as the clip running on the television? Why is it very easy to feel comfort in ‘ab tou kal chuti hogi’ statement? There are some who say ‘Don’t feel bad about things you have no control over’. Okay yes, maybe to some extent we don’t have control over this but when was the last time we helped to save a life? When was the last time you tried to befriend somebody you didn’t know? Bring an outsider in your circle. Help somebody cross the road. Volunteer at a hospital? Did you try to save a life? Did you try to solve maybe somebody’s problem? May be just your own even for that matter or for you life is copying lecture notes, fighting for the front desk, 9-5 job and a goodnight sleep at the end. Do grades and money really matter if you don’t posses an ounce of humanity?

I sometimes wonder why if there are religions and literacy people act like animals. Maybe we are gone so far beyond that nothing is worth salvaging. But when and how did we get to this point? Does a kid pick it at school? Is it in the gene? Is it what television preaches? Why over the passage of time all of us confine ourselves in are cocoons refusing to come out. In fact it’s not even refusing it is not even knowing that we walled our own selves against some unparallel force of hurt, despair, damage. Some untamed energy we are so afraid of that we don’t want to face it. Why? Because world will judge us? Because they will tell us that you don’t fit the ‘cool’ bill? Is all of this worth it if when you die people will remember you by the shiny red Chevy you drove or the amount of your paycheck maybe even your big glass bungalow? We are like the six year old who puts his fingers in his ear and refuses to listen. We are just the same. Then how do we expect to save lives if we refuse to reach out and help. We all can go on and on about 'bringing the change' and 'being the change' as if its bottle of multi-vitamins .. we eat one and Ta-dah you have changed. You want to bring change? ... why don't you start with yourself first.

When I was thirteen I learned that I could talk it up. Later I knew I was good with words. Then I did what I liked. I talked to people on and on about their problems, dreams, hopes and ambitions. I befriended many people that way. Some would come to me with problems and some to I went with mine. It was and still is a two way street - they helped me figure things out for me I helped them sort their issues out. I made sense of lives for many guys and girls I know. I actually talk a lot about myself to my cousins and it always has helped me. My course of action was simple. I wasn’t volunteering anywhere; neither did I enlist myself for some specific society to bring change. My plan of action was to simply talk and sometimes maybe write too.

This is how I choose to save lives.