Am I Just Another Bystander?

Written from my studio in Mumbai on January 3, 2014

Something happened yesterday that I can’t get out of my head.

I was walking home from the train station and came across an unconscious man in his twenties on the overpass stairs. He didn’t appear to be a street person. Just a regular guy in a dress shirt. At first, I nearly walked past him despite knowing that maybe he needed help. I just saw everybody else cruising right past him. My brain was justifying that I shouldn’t rock the boat too much in a foreign country and I’d have no idea how to help him anyways. Deep down, I knew it would be wrong to ignore the situation and I consciously turned around.

I tried waking him up but he was completely out cold. I asked a few passing locals about how I could flag an ambulance. They ignored me or avoided getting involved in the situation. A couple people even looked at me like I was diseased and hastened their pace to get away. Language wasn’t the issue. Young people in Mumbai speak English just fine. Some people just don’t give a fuck.

Eventually someone told me “don’t worry about him, we get drunks like him all the time”. I accepted the explanation and moved on, despite hesitations in the back of my mind that maybe he had a stroke. Or an aneurism. Or an epileptic seizure. That man could have died because nobody stopped to help.

Doing Nothing is Always Easier Than Doing Something

This reminded me of a much more extreme incident in China during 2011where a two-year old girl was run over twice by a car and left to die on the side of the road despite over a dozen nearby bystanders. The incident was caught on CCTV and stunned the people of China. Despite the country’s rapid development there were signs that, at its core, its people were rotten and immoral.

Here’s a link to the full story:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2050438/Yue-Yue-brain-dead-run-twice-ignored-18-people.html  

Sure, it’s a whole different story, but the fundamentals are the same. Someone needed help. Nobody gave a shit. Life went on.

Am I Also Just Another Bystander?

I am living with regret right now for not trying to do more. I blindly accepted the explanation that this man was just another drunk. I allowed myself to justify that, even if I did manage to call the Indian equivalent of 911, the operator would ignore my pleas anyway. Everyone else was walking by, why would 911 care? I also told myself that this is India and life here (sadly) just isn’t considered as precious as it is in Canada.

I am questioning whether or not I have the courage to always hold my integrity and play a role in creating the good society that I want to be a part of. My gut told me there was more I could have done but I still walked away from the situation. This weighs heavily on me because I know that I’ll be in a position of influence in my future and I’m not sure whether I can always do the right thing. Will I just become another corporate executive that unfairly relocates tribal villages so I can build my gold mine? Or be a watchdog that excludes that key detail in my report in exchange for a corporate grant to keep my organization afloat?

I am wondering is whether I can actually make a positive difference to this world. I remember giving away some leftovers in Cambodia to a few street kids and watching other kids rush in to fight over the scraps. I felt like I made the situation even worse. Even with good intentions, there are some things I just can’t change.

Let’s be honest, many people either don’t give a shit about others or they don’t have the courage to do what’s right. But I can’t accept that. I really do want to be a stand for a better world, but in cases like this, I struggle with sticking to my true north. I can’t wait until later in my life to live true to my values. I must do it now.

On those stairs on the way home from the train station, I failed myself and even worse, I failed someone that could have really needed help. Part of me just wants to give up my cause and crawl back to some oil company where I can make 6 figures and have my big screen TV again. In the end, as always, I will persevere. For now, all I can hope is that this guy was just another drunk and he's safely back at home now.

If it were easy to do the right thing and make a difference, everybody would be doing it.