A scarcity of empathy

Sometimes I recall those moments of staring into the endless sea, that ominous feeling of being alone. But the lighthouse has always fascinated me – structures setup by people to help their own but nevertheless with the inevitable usage in mind that the light will also guide those who are not our own. As humans traversed the living space around them, the sea was an enigma. There was always the promise of adventure and possible riches, but primed with the understanding of frequent death and destruction. Travelogues, tales of adventure and fantasy and poetry revolving around sea voyages seem to dominate tomes and tomes of library stacks in the medieval sections. The lighthouse features in many of those, but the sharing of light is not so explicit, and yet it has always been there. The closest I recall is the Hindi language poem “Dehri ka Deep” (“The lamp at the doorstep”) by the Indian poet Harivansh Rai Bacchan, where he talks about the benefit of lighting a lamp outside one’s doorstep as a principle of common good rather than being selfish and imprisoning the light inside our homes. As time went by, I grew up and that light seem to be getting dimmer by the day. The lightouse that I see now is more of a history, a part of lost era in books meant for tourist guides historical justifications. The building now seem to be a fascination for each passerby to capture it as memory or nostalgia in their camera lenses.

The same seem to happen with emotions. So are the similarities with idea of help and kindness! It now looks that such feelings have climbed a conscious step towards philanthropy. Something that we desperately need our future generation to acquire. A quality they need because it is to be kept on a pedestal. An act out of habit, an action that used to come so naturally to us all, just like the air we breathe is no more the same. It is that part of being that I considered to be as natural as my organic instict to exist and not something that has to be the developed and nutured consciously. The lighthouse that by instinct is there to show the way to anyone and everone who happen to fall in its line of sight. Similarly the instinct to empathise and just simply feel for that other soul which is not us is no more a regular act. This thought is as random as the feeling but the hurt and fear of it being lost for good is as specific and real as life. The scarcity of empathy is so visible that I feel with passing of time this word will enter the dictionary of loss…