This is a true story, not inspirational...

I do not mean to inspire people who read this, but I do hope it tingles your brain cells and revives the humanity that gets lost in the undercurrents of work and toil.

May the power of love and truth be with you. (Gosh I sound like a messiah :D)

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The only credential Mumbai has ever asked of its people is the boldness to dream. For those who do, it unlocks its gates and its treasures, not caring who they are, or where they come from. I have lived in this city of dreams for over fifteen years, and until last year, I believed in the magical nature of Mumbai. But having now realized the futility of my beliefs, I know that half the misery caused in Mumbai is due to ignorance, while the other half is due to knowledge.
There was nothing exceptional about that Thursday. I was being dropped to my friend’s place by our driver, as the sunny sky and grey clouds loomed above us. Mumbai traffic is utter pandemonium. There is no ordered system of traffic signals, and hardly any zebra crossings. Being able to cross the junction between the suburb and the main city is a huge feat in itself, especially if you are in a car, like we were. As usual, we were waiting for the signal to turn green, and I noticed a motorcycle crossing the road. My eyes followed, and to my absolute horror, a truck, coming from the wrong end of the road drove right into the motorbike. After a second or two, the truck backed, and went over the edge of the motorbike again, almost crushing the two people whom I could see lying in their pool of blood.
The sheer horror of what I had just witnessed made my blood chill. I wanted to scream, run out and help those two men, yet I couldn’t. It felt as though my body was no longer in control of my brain, and that despite the fact that minutes were passing by and no one was getting out of their vehicles, I sat there, tears rolling down my shut eyes, clenching my fists as I tried to push away from the awful and sickening sight that lay in front of me. I knew in my heart that the wounded would be taken care of. So I opened my eyes, thinking they would be gone, but to my shock, there they lay, dead or alive, I didn’t know.
That’s when the wall of my belief and reality crashed down upon me. Wasting no more time, I got out of the car, ran to the two bodies, called the ambulance and took them to the nearest hospital. After hours of diagnostic tests and immense numbers of blood transfusions, one of them survived. Ryan has brain hemorrhage, and with each passing day, his ability to reason, think, distinguish faces is diminishing. Amit died in the hospital a few days after the accident. Both had been studying mechanical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai.
Ryan’s parents call me up often, telling me his progress. I feel good thinking that one day he might lead the normal, simple life he had been before the appalling episode. Whenever I go back to Mumbai for my summer and winter holidays, I make it a point to meet him, and spend some time talking to him about inanimate things, just to lighten up his mood. But this affair has opened the blindfold that I had put over my eyes regarding Mumbai and its love for people. A city is nothing without its people. Without you and me. Everything is subjective compared to that fact. I realized that day, when I took Ryan and Amit to the hospital that so many of us live such facile lives because we haven’t been able to remedy ourselves from believing that other’s lives are not interconnected to ours. Before dreaming of becoming complete human beings, we need to stop this despicable indifference people have towards individuals. I can no longer ignore the fact that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
Through this incident, the perspective with which I’ve started looking at my city has made me feel like I’m rediscovering Mumbai all over again. It seems as if we have lost ourselves in this huge world, which is why our reaction to people’s miseries is so limited. But because the soul has such deep roots in personal and social life and its values runs so contrary to modern concerns, caring for the souls around us, like Ryan’s, might just be the most rational choice we make.