Have we got no decency left?

It is common sense that the human condition always evolves in contradictions. The night takes turn with the day, birth with death, joy with sorrow and glitter with gloom. But how about opening the largest shopping mall in South Asia when two-thirds of the country was inundated and 30 million people lived like lemmings in water? Promise I have no intention to serve emotional pablum, but it does not quite gel in my imagination.

I understand it is all part of the mammoth march of life. It is showtime folks, and the show must never stop. Yet it seems odd, simply odd that nothing should change when millions suffer, that we must push our agenda even when it hurts. Do not get me wrong. I am not against the fanfares of life. We all need it. We all need a bit of sound and fury, even though it may not signify anything.

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But could we not have postponed the weddings, receptions and launches for a little longer? I am just asking if a little delay would have been very difficult, if we could have waited until the country fully recovered from the ruins of the flood? No hard and fast rule, just human decency for the same reason we mourn when there is a death in the family. For the same reason we lower the volume of the television set, when there is a death next door. For the same reason we keep the national flag at half-mast during state funerals.

Not that there has been very many deaths as a result of the flood. But people have suffered and they are still suffering as the receding waters leave behind a wasteland of hunger, diseases and privation. Those who are rich and powerful, innovators and entrepreneurs, those who are the real doers amongst us, they may have a fairly justified reason to feel impatient. The natural calamities come every year, but ideas and action plans cannot wait. They must hit the iron when it is hot, and stitch in time to save nine. I admire these prophets of prosperity. Hats off to them!

But still I would say that we could have waited. Times like this bring ecology of pain, when people are desperate for food and shelters, when diseases spread, when the country does not look like a happening place. There is also lot of anxieties in the minds of people who do not know when they would go back home. These people live on the brink from hand to mouth. They have not worked for days and do not know how soon they are going to get a job again.

Nobody is asking us to share that pain. We do not need to give up a meal or a room in the house to a displaced person or family. We do not need to sleep less, or cut down on the TV time or slow down on business expansions. What we need is to remember that we share this planet with other people, who are not fortunate like us. What we need is to remember that we have no right to despise their hardship as much as we expect them not to despise our happiness. It is the question of simple decency for the same reason we do not smoke in no-smoking areas, let ladies go first or give up our seats to the elderly and the sick in bus or train.

Of late I came to know that Jagdish Bhagwati, an eminent professor at Columbia University and a fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations in the U.S., worked at the Indian Planning Commission in his younger days. Fresh out of Oxford, Bhagwati tried to determine how to raise the incomes of the poorest, and he soon arrived at the conclusion that if inequality was more or less a given, the only hope was to expand the pie rather than slicing it up differently.

That is what has been happening since the demise of communism and the triumph of capitalism. Nobody talks about slicing up differently, but everybody is busy expanding the pie. The shopping mall, the first anniversary of a new TV channel, the glitz of dinner parties, these are nothing but telltale signs that some of us are pushing hard to stretch that pie.

Good news for all of us, even for those who are floating in the water, those who are hungry, their rickety bodies wasted by diarrhea, cholera, dengue and malaria. They should be happy for the same reason a fabled king had once fined a peasant, who was accused of keeping his body warm in the heat of light from the king's palace across the river.

We do not know if glitter of lights from all these parties kept warm the souls of the flood victims. We do not know if their hearts ever swelled in pride to know that while they stood in the crushing queues for a ladle of rice, their country boasted to have the largest shopping center in the region. We do not even know what they thought, if they thought at all when their minds and bodies were numb with shock.

What about us, the vainglorious, the versatile, who regularly go overseas for health check to find if our minds and bodies are shipshape and intact? What about us, the busybodies, the barnstormers, the barracudas, the bumblebees of business, the soldiers of the progressive pie? What happened to us? What made us so numb, our hearts cold and our minds senseless? How could we ignore the miseries of millions in our jest for jubilation?

Benjamin Disraeli drew the distinction between the rich and the poor, claiming that they were two different nations between whom there was no intercourse and no sympathy. He then explained that the rich and the poor were ignorant of each other's habits, thoughts and feelings as if they were dwellers of different zones, inhabitants of different planets. But then what he further said made more sense. He said the rich and the poor were formed by different breeding, fed by different food, ordered by different manners and governed by different laws.

We could not have made that difference more strident when we turned on the floodlights during the flood, when we created flotillas of festivity in a sea of sorrow, when we spotted the islets of insensitivity in an ocean of ordeals. The rich and the poor are like stains on the clothes, which could not be removed despite repeated wash. We have tried philosophy, we have tried ideology and we have tried religion. But then in the end we settled for decency to understand and accept the mutual rights within mutual plights.

In Man and Superman, George Bernard Shaw said that decency was indecency's conspiracy of silence. In past weeks, what we have done is broken that code of silence. We have screamed at the poor louder than ever before, telling them that they were different from us. Pardon me when I include myself in the "us". It is not because I am rich, but because I am not poor. But it is also because I would like to be one of us before I go around and ask whether we have got any decency left.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.