My World is Filled with Good-Ordinary People

The world is filled with good ordinary people. There are no saints and sinners, bright and dim, but only good and ordinary people. Often we see people and say "how good people are!" Watch them; see how much good is engraved deep into them. Yet they are also very ordinary. They can lie. They can cheat. They can abuse you even for silly reasons. They are even capable of doing harm that we say, how a human being can do that to me. Often in life, humans tend to look at the ordinariness of the people around them. In one's own ways people think more about the hurts that they have received or the evil that they have seen in others. The "good is often interred with their bones" or are blind to them. And we begin to categorize people with our prejudices about them. We loose the gift of pleasure of living with them.

I remember Radhakrishnan from a village near Palaghat. He was an unskilled labourer. One midnight his pregnant wife was in pangs. Being alone in their little hut, he was scared and wanted to take to the hospital, some 16 KMs away. He went around pleading taxi and autos. But none was willing to go to his village breaking their sleep in that dead rainy night. One was willing, but for an exorbitant fare. He did not have that kind of money.

It was already about two in the morning. He carried his wife on his shoulders to the hospital. When she was in labour pains lying in the delivery ward. He sat on the veranda of that government hospital. He thought about the suffering and helplessness of the poor like himself. Sitting on the veranda of that hospital he took decision to buy an auto.

His wife delivered a girl child, but she did not survive to see the baby. Tragedy in spite, Radhakrishnan mortgaged his house and his little plot of land and bought an auto rickshaw and name it Revati. Behind the auto this message was written: "For pregnant women this vehicle is free"

Even today we can see this rickshaw on the roads of Palaghat!