The fourth step

Ironically it was Mrs. Rama who told me about Rudra. He had been an average student in his time but a really good person who would do just about any thing for anyone. He had majored in Marketing and after a stint in an MNC had decided to setup his own BPO.

Like every good person whose motivations are unclear, Rudra too hid a reservoir of pain within him. He had lost the love of his life to a freak accident and no one helped him and all he could do was watch as she died on the road. Rudra had decided then and there to make sure that he’d try his best to be a better human being. Like every good person Rudra had been molded by tragedy and pain into a fine human being who found a reason to live in others.

I remained unaffected by this revelation. Partly because the sorry idealism that lay beneath the reality of a man betrayed by fate was something that I could not relate to. Life had been cruel to me too but then I firmly believed that man remains in control of his own destiny, no matter how bad the circumstances.

And partly because I also believe that good is motivated more by an essential self centeredness of the person doing something good than in their feelings of altruism. I firmly believe that any one doing something that classifies as good does it out pure self interest. A person giving alms to a beggar does so not because the beggar is destitute but because by doing so he eases his own conscience.

I read a poem once that best captured the sentiment. Entitled “Somebody’s Mother,” the poem describes a bent old woman standing on the edge of a busy street wanting to get cross but unable to do so. A group of schoolboys passes by and only one of them stops and helps her across. When his friends ask him why did so, he says that she’s somebody’s mother and that person would be grateful to know that someone had helped his mother cross the road.

Notice that the expectation of gratitude and not basic human decency is the motivating factor behind the boy’s action. Each day innumerable do gooders cross our lives either directly or indirectly but how much of that goodness is actually rooted in altruism? Scratch the surface and you would be surprised to know that the number is very small. Even the most altruistic of people derive a sense of satisfaction from their altruism and that in itself is selfish.

Rudra was no exception. He spread goodness in an effort to ease his own pain. Not with the express intention of doing something good. He helped someone to ensure that a small measure of satisfaction would bring deliverance from the nightmares that plagued his sleep and relief from the demons that encircled his consciousness.

So I wasn’t that surprised when he stopped his car that night. He had to. In such acts lay his salvation, or so he believed.