Are We All Becoming Less and Less Humane…?

 

Is it that the Kevin Carter syndrome is there in all of us? Are we all in some sense standing mute witness to the injustice, maybe not capturing videos or photographs like some do, and hence those who do, they in so doing, exhibit the syndrome in all its grandeur, while others, suppress theirs.

The apathy building up in the country is increasingly evidenced through incidents as were reported in news channels this week showing the unfortunate incident where a husband had to carry his dead wife’s body for some 10 km because he couldn’t afford a vehicle, and the hospital refused him an ambulance service to ferry the dead body of his wife. This was followed by another shocking video of an old 80-year old’s body, where rigor mortis had set in, was shown being broken into two so that it could be packed into a gunny bag and hung on a bamboo stick so as to be taken afar - just two videos among the many that have almost sort of become a series in itself. And scientists could well probe to see if there is indeed a recessive “Kevin Carter” gene (for lack of a better term) and if it isn’t becoming dominant in all of us.

Apparently these happen all the time in villages and it is only now that these are being captured on videos and being telecast. Apparently, in fact, the Orissa government had recently launched the ambulance scheme precisely to address such issues, which obviously needs much to be done.

The above videos had come up just days after the video showing a man being hit and run by a light vehicle, the driver of which had come out to check if the man was dead, and then was simply seen  driving away, and this didn’t end there. The hit and run case had another twist, the dead man on the road had another beast of a human – this time a rickshaw puller, who stopped his rickshaw in the middle of the road, only to come and steal the dead man’s mobile.

Prior to this, there were videos that were shown of dogs that were flung to death by to-be doctors – for fun. Around the same time, some 10 year olds had burnt to death little puppies – also for fun. These had given rise to raging debates among animal lovers and understandably disturbed people and people help groups about what was going wrong in the society.  

What was shocking was that all the above mentioned incidents were captured on video, which led one to wonder if whoever was capturing the videos weren’t guilty of exhibiting the Kevin Carter syndrome.

But like all topics of discussion, these too were temporal in nature. With time, new tides of topics washed away the old ones, giving space for new.

Reflective of a deep rot that is setting in. An abysmal lack of apathy in people. We are becoming a part of a growing set of people where compassion is becoming a thing of the past. You hear of increasing number of people say things like, “I don’t have the patience to sit and understand…; I can’t stand emotional melodrama…”

A 2011 article in the American journal, Scientific American had reported that empathy levels had been declining in the last 30 years, with the same journal reporting a ‘steep fall’ in the last decade of the same decline period. Not sure if there are many more studies or valid statistics to fall back on, but what is happening around us seem to be clear warning bell.

Human beings were different from animals because of three virtues – patience, emotion and empathy. All three are being lost. Lost to a world that is increasingly becoming focussed on individual goals.  

Whether it is the society that is to blame or the individual, it doesn’t matter – almost like the proverbial chicken and egg story, what does however matter is that we awaken to the dangers lurking within us and at least awaken the human in us.