Indian Independence Day today, celebrating 63 years of independence from 200 years of British rule. There was a cultural celebration at the Hatch Shell in Boston, next to the Charles River, where first children and then adults performed Bollywood-style dances, all decked out in bright colours, bedecked with gold and silver and other shiny things.
Indians really are the most beautiful people in the world, I think. Maybe everyone should just inter-marry with Indian people, and then the whole world would be sort of toffee-coloured and lovely-looking, and no one would be prejudiced against anyone ever again, because we'd all be the same colour anyway.
Barney Frank, the celebrated gay Massachusetts congressman of the gravelly voice, whose actions and words live up to his last name, gave a speech about America being a land of immigrants and how that means that we are a strong bunch of people, because immigrants are more often than not hard workers, with an entrepreneurial spirit, boldly leaping into the unknown, to make a better life for themselves and their families. Which made me feel quite good too. Although our girls could not be part of that better life, more's the pity.
Tim and I went in to Boston on the orange-line train, which we have not done for such a long time. When we first moved to America we lived right near the city, just a few T-stops away, and went in quite frequently. It was always an adventure, finding our way, everything strange and sometimes difficult and often exciting. Now we are old hands, although it often amazes me how we know our way around now. We have all those new maps imprinted on our brains, we know how to use the machine to put more money on a charlie-card, the ticket needed for the T, we know where to get off and change to a different colour train in order to get where we are going. We can even usually give lost people directions!
On the way home today, as we got on to the T, a girl further down the carriage had fallen off her seat, it seemed, and people were helping her up. She was saying, "I don't feel very well..." and looking rather pale and confused. People were wonderfully helpful - a middle-aged woman and her husband sort of took charge of her, gave her their water-bottle and made her drink, then suggested that perhaps she needed something sweet, so an old man across the aisle offered a piece of gum, and a young man standing near the door gave her a whole bag of candy! And then the middle-aged woman sat next to her and chatted away to her, asking her questions, cheering her up, and slowly the colour came back into her face, and by the time her good samaritans reached their station she was fine, and once they had left her I could hear her telling someone on the other end of her cellphone the whole story. And I thought of Barney Frank's speech, because all the people in this story, all the people in our carriage, came from every corner of the earth originally, African, Chinese, Korean, European, and mixtures of races too, and everyone worked together to fix one girl. Those who didn't do anything constructive smiled at one another when she was looking better, and watched her carefully once the original caregivers had left the train, ready to offer more help if needed. Altruism right there in front of our eyes.
(Some neurobiologists believe that altruism is not a superior moral faculty but actually hard-wired into the brain, something which gives us pleasure. Research has shown that altruistic deeds activate the mesolimbic reward pathway in the brain in the same way as food and sex.
No comments:
Post a Comment