Vishal Heart

I have lately developed a habit - I don’t know good or bad or is it because of the profession in which I am – that in everything I try to look for a take away. Only for this habit these days my son warns me on my offer to him for a movie that it would alright for him if I don’t buy him a coke and popcorn in the interval but if at the end of the movie I am going to discuss the take away from the movie he would rather chose other options of entertainment than accompanying me for the movie.

Be it as it may, the purpose of this article is to try and find out the take away of the bubbly dinner and cocktail party that I attended last Friday. It was a usual business-season-end celebration party and the average age of the party folks was between 25 and 30 years. Perhaps my presence in the party was instrumental in pushing the average-age number northwards.

The rise in the spirit at the party was directly proportional to the speed at which the stock of the spirit at the bar-tender’s table was diminishing. And quite common to any such youth parties there was a guy who got on to his ‘high’ quite early in the party, let’s call him Mr Hi.

Now comes the take away part.....

I was observing from a distance that there were clearly three classes of people in that evening’s party and once you read down further, probably you would tend to think that these three classes of people can be found in variety of situations in society.

One class of party-men belonged to those who were enjoying the party themselves, indifferent to the literal rise and fall of Mr Hi – let’s call them the neutral class, where probably majority of society members are covered under. The other class belonged to those who keeping their own spirits in control were inspiring Mr Hi to drink more and provide more fun to the party – let’s call them the fun class. The line of control between “fun” and “fun @ the cost of someone” was getting blurred when the fun class started finding rather uncommon means of enjoyment with Mr Hi at the centre of the dance floor. Exactly at that time I found the other and very thinly populated class of people - represented in that party by a single individual but with a big or ‘vishal’ heart. This representative was albeit part of the fun class initially but the moment he realized possibility of crossing the line of control between “fun” and “fun @ the cost of someone”, he distanced himself from the fun class to create his own class. With each passing moment, this man with a big heart was getting upset at the fun class for the fun that was being extracted at the cost of Mr Hi. And soon he could not resist himself to walk straight in the middle of the dance floor to help Mr Hi get out of the mess he had ‘unconsciously’ created for himself. I am sure there were many others in the party who wanted to help Mr Hi but just let that feeling or instinct go by or chose to turn a blind’s eye – a simpler approach. In fact some of the party folks reached out this gentleman to teach him to be indifferent and dissuaded him from ‘interfering’ in others’ affairs probably because it did not affect any of them.

What happened subsequently was not very relevant. For me the take away was to introspect into which class I belonged to that evening. And frankly with great hesitation (or confession) the answer came from within - the neutral class! This was just a representative situation of many other we come across in every walk of our life. We do not subscribe to many things from within but just let them go by. Many of us tend to take a short cut of letting go by things around us. We forget that what differentiates the mankind from rest of the living beings is the “sensitivity” about others and more so about the fellow human beings. We tend to follow a simple philosophy that let the messiah to save the society be born –not to us but to the neighbour.

Can you answer for yourself which class would you have belonged to that evening? Do we all have courage to change over from the neutral or the fun class if our conscience wants us to or do we suppress our instincts and follow the majority of the neutral or the fun class? I would want to ponder over this.....