Doing good to others

Doing something good to others is noble. Others can include social and not-so-social animals. I am sure all will agree to this. There is enough material shared in all possible social media to drive this point. I don’t have to over emphasise it here.

With that motto in mind I started cleaning my car myself. Good to the car and good to me as well, some exercise to my body. One fine day I found out that my neighbour was vacating his house. Not sure whether it is good or bad to me or to him -  only time would tell. But it was definitely bad for the boy who used to come and clean my neighbour’s car for a fee. I thought I would do something good to that boy. I could make out from his appearance, he was from another far-off state and being migrant struggling to meet both ends meet. Moreover, I believe that something, which I am not good at, needs to be outsourced to someone who may not be that good at it. But since it is a paid job he would be more committed than myself, of course under my supervision!

So it started off well on the first day, car cleaning by that boy, with no major incidents. But unfortunately, the very incident of cleaning the car itself happened only for a few days in the month. Many days, I used to wait for him and he didn’t show up even after 9 AM. I also could not undertake that work myself when he was absent since car cleaning is one such activity I would prefer to do early in the mornings like many other important cleaning ones.

End of the month, he promptly came to collect the charges. When I questioned him, he told me that he was absent only for a few days. I thought I would give him another chance. Gave him half-month charges and allowed him to continue with his services for another month.

His willingness to allow me to do something good to him drastically reduced. Far more less days he was present in the subsequent month. With lots of deliberation, I had to stop his services giving him another half-month charges by month end. Otherwise in the process of trying to help him, it might bring in lots of inconvenience to me.

So I restarted cleaning my vehicle myself.  And while doing that activity I find one fairly old man going for his usual morning walk. Good man like me. Nice music will play from his mobile phone, good peppy numbers from Bollywood – one usual song is “Choli ke peeche kya hey !”. He is kind enough to keep it in good volume. So that it is audible to others, just to keep them also in a good mood.

But, today apart from the music generating device, he had a large polythene bag in his hands.  As he moved away from me I saw him bending down and spreading the contents on the middle of the road. It was unused greens and he was trying to do something good to those cows. Those very cows who always pass by me and stop for a moment and appreciate what I am doing until I wave them off. Cows just smelt it and ignored. Good that they were not hungry, otherwise they would have eaten that huge chunk of rotten greens and also the huge milli-micron thick polythene bag which the old man mercilessly threw right in the middle of the road in anger ! As such corporation workers do good things hardly once a week by pretending to sweep the roads. No doubt that plastic bag would fly around eternally unless it is eaten by a hungry cow.

So let me stand corrected. Doing something good to others is noble, so long as it is required by the other party. So long as it doesn’t result in inconvenience to self or others.