One sweltering afternoon in Delhi, as I drove home after a client session, a man by the roadside caught my eye. His matted hair and tattered coat were buttoned to the throat, defying the heat that had everyone else in short sleeves.
Slowing my car, I saw him crouched over a roadside drain, scooping discarded chickpea curry with his bare hands. The sight twisted my gut amid the indifference of passersby.
For a split second, the urge to drive on gripped me, as it had so many times before in this city of stark contrasts. What held me back was not indifference, but habit—the ease with which routine teaches us to keep moving rather than respond. Then something shifted; I rolled down the window and called out, “Stay here. I’m coming.”
He didn’t even look up.
What unnerved me most was not what hunger compelled that man to do, but how seamlessly my world had trained me to accept such suffering as background noise rather than a summon to act.
Racing home, I grabbed a bag of fresh fruit—oranges, bananas, whatever was at hand—and sped back, only to find the spot empty. I parked, walked the length of the drain, peering into bushes, afraid he had vanished. A little farther ahead, behind a low bush, I found him eating hastily, as if guarding even the leftover food from being taken away.
As I approached, he glanced up, eyes wide with a mix of suspicion and surprise. In that unguarded instant, I saw how vulnerability breeds wariness in a world that often looks away.
“Beta,” I murmured, “I’ve brought this for you. Please don’t eat from the drain.”
He took the bag without a word and walked away, peeling a banana. I ached to rest my hand on his shoulder, to offer something warmer than food—but that urge was mine, not his. In that moment, all he needed was to eat in peace. I watched him disappear in the distance, my eyes stinging.
Back home, I sat down and cried—not from pity, but from seeing myself in him. I had lived in this city for decades, passing scenes of hardship almost daily, yet it had been a long time since any of them had truly touched my core like that. I was confronted by how easily I’d learned to look away. I realised that every barrier we raise between ourselves and others confines us too. We cannot make someone feel excluded without shrinking our own humanity. Nor can we turn away from another’s suffering without quietly abandoning something within ourselves.
In the quiet that followed, I saw how easily we draw invisible boundaries—between our routines and others’ struggles for raw survival, between lives that run parallel but rarely intersect. These boundaries reinforce the illusion of separation and quietly narrow our instinct to respond.
The bag of fruit I offered didn’t change his circumstances. It didn’t change mine either, in any dramatic way. But in a polarised world where small acts of kindness are radical, that modest act bridged an unspoken divide. Feeding a hungry person once doesn't solve the problem of hunger or change the world. Yet when life places such moments before us, doing what we can still matters—because it means a world to the person in front of us.
Often, we hesitate—not from apathy, but from the fear of standing out, intruding, or getting it wrong—especially in a culture that prizes individual achievements over collective empathy. It takes a quiet kind of courage to follow the faint tug of compassion rather than the stronger pull of staying uninvolved—especially when conformity makes looking away feel normal and stepping forward feel risky.
That afternoon, I understood how thin the illusion of separateness really is. In such raw encounters, the chasms between us shrink, exposing our universal craving for dignity. For me, too, that simple gesture dissolved the distance I had imagined between us and left behind a calm I hadn’t expected.
That man by the drain, the executive in a glass tower, the child selling balloons at a traffic light—each inhabits and navigates a different version of the same fractured world. Bound by the same quest for survival and respect, each of them is trying, in their own ways, to make it through the day. All deserve the same basic compassion.
Each time I recognise myself in someone I might once have overlooked—a homeless man sleeping under a flyover or a beggar pleading for alms—my sense of belonging widens. The myth of “us versus them” begins to fall away. It becomes harder for me to cling to the comforting belief that the lives of others—especially those living at the margins—have nothing to do with mine.
The man by the drain lingers in my mind still. Now, when the impulse to avert my eyes from another’s hardship arises—amid debates on poverty and privilege—I pause and opt for the kinder path, however small, knowing it ripples outward.