My Name Is Khan had put forward a thought about the world consisting of only two types of people: good and bad. Conceptually, and broadly speaking, it might be true, but we’ll all unanimously agree that there are elements of good and bad in all of us. When we are judging a person we do not know anything about, it takes only but one good or bad episode for us to be or not to be impressed by him.
I’m going to write about something on the same lines. It’s not something that’s never happened with anyone, but I’m going to talk about it in the relevance of the essentially good and bad people we come across in our everyday lives, when an assumingly ‘sober’ person displays his dark side and a visibly ‘mawali’ person turns out as the good one.
While travelling long distances in Mumbai me and A prefer to take the ‘conventional’ mode of transport, the local train. The travelling time is reduced to half since traffic is not a problem and baby A too does not seem to mind the ride. In fact he enjoys all the activity around, he even smiles at the hawkers and eunuchs sometimes, much to my annoyance. Anyway, coming back to our topic..
Since we were travelling together and it was a Saturday, A suggested that I enter into the general compartment with him, and I obliged. As luck would have it, the train only got more and more crowded with every passing station. A squeezed his way through the crowd, but petrified with the thought of me brushing against those men stinking of God-knows-what-all; I cornered myself near the door.
An elderly man was standing next to me and was supposedly carrying something in his hands. Gingerly he moved step by step near me and his hand touched me suggestively. I ignored it a couple of times assuming it to be a genuine mistake. However, not the one to give up on it, he was persistent. I decided to take him to task and reprimanded him while all the other stunned men stared at us incredulously. He got the message alright! All this while A didn’t have the slightest idea of what happened.
While coming back home the same situation stared at me in the face and A promised that this time round he wouldn’t leave my side even for a second. What followed, ironically, was something I hadn’t expected. A guy who looked like a typical ‘tapori’ saw me struggling for some space to stand, and very courteously indeed, left his place and offered it to me. The smile on my face that time was honest and genuinely thankful.
Eve-teasing is a crime that probably every girl has to bear with, but few have the courage to stand up to it or raise their voice against it. We choose to keep quiet in fear of embarrassment in front of others or scared of what else might follow. This in turn only encourages these perverts to take us for granted and continue their sleazy acts. I’ve always chosen not to take it lying down and would persuade every girl to think and act similarly.
These two episodes forced me to think about how deceptive appearances can be. We classify a person as good or bad based on what we’ve seen or heard about him, but it does not comprise his whole personality. Therefore, I beg to differ from Karan Johar and Shahrukh Khan on this idea. Only good and only bad people can exist only in a perfect world, and ours is what imperfection stands for.
