Of how people treat other people

Today while I was travelling by train, this little beggar girl came into the compartment. She must have been all of 4 and had a badly bruised lip. It looked like a very recent wound. After walking around the compartment for a bit, she came close to where I was sitting and tapped an elderly lady on her knee, asking for some money. Now I don’t give beggars anything, but I was shocked to see this lady’s reaction to the girl. She made a totally disgusted face and went “Shee! Shee! Haath mat lagao! Hatt!” (Yuck! Yuck! Don’t touch me! Shoo!). She just didn’t want the girl’s dirty hands on her clothes. By this time, another lady started digging into her purse, to which Lady No. 1 said very loudly and very Oh-I’m-so-learned-ly, “Yeh log ko paise mat do! Sab aise hi rehte hai. Paisa nahi hai toh inko paida hi kyon karte hai?” (Don’t give these guys any money! They are all the same. Why do they give birth to children if they don’t have money?).  Lady No. 2 just kept nodding and pulled out a toffee from her purse and gave it to the kid. Thank god for that woman. In the next 2 minutes that I was on the train, I saw two other people treating the girl with equal disdain.

Which gets me to thinking...what has the poor little 4 yr old done to deserve this kind of treatment? No kid likes begging. She’s probably treated at home the same way and forced to beg. And I noticed how people were simply angry coz she was very dirty and they just didn’t want their clothes to be spoiled. I should probably also mention that this was at 20:30 hrs and people were coming back from office or wherever so I can’t even think that they were worried to wear stained clothes to office. What kind of psychological warfare goes through a little kid’s mind when they’re treated like this? And how horrible are we to treat innocent lives like this (I don’t even like kids and I felt so bad)?

I spoke to a good friend of mine about this and he asked me what I did to make the girl feel better. I didn’t do anything at all, I said. But I wonder, isn’t it acceptable simply not to be horrible? According to my friend, the middle path does not count at all. Your actions as a person count only based on either extreme. Worse, he also said that I was just being emotional and not practical about it. That this was the only way to stop people from bugging you while begging. And that the girl would get conditioned and it wouldn’t affect her psychology anymore than another poor person in the city.

I want to tell my friend that when it comes to dealing with people, it not only matters how you affect them in a good way, but also how you don’t affect them in a bad way. Be nice.