The other day I shared the news about a Muslim bus driver whose bravery and presence of mind prevented a bigger carnage from happening, when the bus he was driving was shot at by gunmen on its way to Amarnath, a Hindu pilgrimage.
A few of my friends protested about this case getting more than necessary coverage because the driver was Muslim whereas there are many good Samaritans from other religions too who have done equally if not more commendable acts.
It was a healthy argument with moderate vs a slightly extreme point of view. I consider myself a moderate, who is against all kinds of hypocrisy whether they are from Left or Right, with a penchant to mock and poke at them. But let's keep the religion aside for second and commend such an humane act which trumps over the rest, putting everything else divisive and parochial into the back burner.
No question, there are many fearless, selfless and faceless heroes who belongs to all religions. But that is besides the point. With due respect to the opinions of my friends, credit should be given where credit is due. Simply ask the persons inside the bus who survived. For them the driver is a messiah, his religion not withstanding.
Let me elucidate this by siting a couple of real life examples. Once during a telephonic interview here in US, one Desi Bhai (slang to denote Indians in America) grilled me over technical question, especially those rote specific (Americans ask questions at conceptual level but our Desi Bhais take a sadistic pleasure in verifying how much we memorize. Probably it explains why we rarely innovate). He asked me if I remember a particular error code, which is very rarely encountered, but you can always get from the manual.
I politely answered that I don't know the answer. At the other end I could hear a sarcastic chuckle. I promptly asked, "Mind telling what's that error code is ?". He said - " I don't know". I felt like punching his face. It is important to find out from an interviewee what he or she knows, not to dwell over unimportant things that person doesn't know. However our Desi Bhais don't feel the same way.
Here is another anecdote from my childhood days. My grandfather was a Sanskrit teacher and scholar. On hot Indian Summer nights the village folks used to be entertained by PALA (a song and dance sequence with musical enactment of popular mythologies). My grandfather being one of the few learned ones from that generation was tasked to test the validity and erudite of the PALABAALAs (the guys performing PALA).
Those PALAs used to continue till wee hours of the morning. On the way back home, a fellow villager trying to impress my grandfather uttered, "PANDITE (O Pundit), the GAYAKA (The lead performer) explained that Lord Ram sent Hanuman to South and 3 others to East, West, North respectively to look out for his wife Sita. I asked him to name all of them. But other than Hanuman he could not name the rest".
My grandfather responded - "SEMANE JHAADA JAI THILE (they all went to take a dump). It's more important that Hanuman went South and located Sita in Lanka who was kidnapped by Ravana. Who or where the rest went is Mythology, unimportant in this context". The rest walking on the Bhargavi embankment shaking the NIA HULA (A handmade fire torch) in the darkness of the dawn had a good laugh, as my Grandpa nailed his point.
If someone did a good job today, I will extol it and that more important. The fact that I did not mention about the millions who did a tremendous job in the last Millennium - be them Hindus, Christian, Buddhists, Jains or Jews is certainly outstanding but is not necessarily important to be mentioned in this context.
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