An amazing incident happened yesterday. I was riding a scooter in a lane near home, and I stopped at a turn when a child was playing in the middle of the road as his father was walking beside him. Seeing me on the scooter, his father caught hold of the child with a jerk and moved him to a side of the lane. He then said to me in a genuine apologetic tone, "I am sorry!"
I said to him in an accommodating, non-condescending way, "Please don't say sorry to me. This (the street) is as much his as it is mine..." The father was amazed, and probably rightly so.
We live in a world filled increasingly with the idea of ownership. 'My', 'mine', 'myself' are the watchwords. We are all the time trying to prove to others or even to ourselves sometimes, that we are better than the others... The road is created for our convenience, the vehicles are there for our use, the vendors exist to sell wares to us. We are at the centre of our universes...
I, like all of us, need to reflect on this tendency of ours, and realize and remember, that we exist among others. We would be nothing without the others. As Bakhtin would probably say, my identity belongs to all - what I am is determined by what I am to others...
PS: I am glad I spontaneously said those words to the child's father... I want to be like that more and more! I hope I can...
I said to him in an accommodating, non-condescending way, "Please don't say sorry to me. This (the street) is as much his as it is mine..." The father was amazed, and probably rightly so.
We live in a world filled increasingly with the idea of ownership. 'My', 'mine', 'myself' are the watchwords. We are all the time trying to prove to others or even to ourselves sometimes, that we are better than the others... The road is created for our convenience, the vehicles are there for our use, the vendors exist to sell wares to us. We are at the centre of our universes...
I, like all of us, need to reflect on this tendency of ours, and realize and remember, that we exist among others. We would be nothing without the others. As Bakhtin would probably say, my identity belongs to all - what I am is determined by what I am to others...
PS: I am glad I spontaneously said those words to the child's father... I want to be like that more and more! I hope I can...
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