Care for thy neighbour

One of our neighbours in Mysore, was celebrating his grandchild’s birthday. My wife was not upset with the fact that she was not able to attend the function but with the attitude of the neighbour. They had coolly used our compound wall to tie the rope of the shamiana without bothering to even take permission from us.

I was just pondering over what my wife told me, when I happened to chance on a small news item in the news agency ticker. Somehow this interesting titbit had escaped many a newspaper. This related to the celebrity couple Clintons’ daughter Chelsea Clinton’s recent wedding. Chelsea’s wedding planner had sent a note thanking the neighbour for putting up with road closures on the day of  her wedding: “Dear neighbour, This Saturday, Astor Court (189 River Road), will be the site for a very special event. There may be periodic road closures on River Road on Saturday evening. Should you have any difficulty accessing the road, please call us at 617 (896-044). We want to thank you in advance for your patience and cooperation. Please accept this gift as a token of our appreciation.”

The gift was a bottle of wine. We all know how Chelsea’s wedding had created quite some sensation, but President Barack Obama was not among those invited. But what is to be understood is the sensitivity displayed by the Clintons who did not just bulldoze their neighbour and blocked the road. Do we ever hear of such gestures here? What we see however, is about a minister getting angry and roughing up a citizen for overtaking him or with sirens blaring, crisscrossing the length and breadth of the city with total disregard for an ambulance carrying a patient in dire need of emergency medical attention.

Another interesting picture that I saw was that of the President Obama himself shifting the sofa in the White House along with his aide. Imagine our netas ever indulging in such mundane things. Not only do most of them think it is below their dignity but since the dynastic rule is the name of the game, the spoilt heirs to the gaddis have never been trained to think of the aam aadmi’s grind with the daily chores.

We berate the West all the time for the wrong influence it has on our younger generation like disregard for family values, not caring for the elders, marriages, etc. But is not the gesture of Clintons worth emulating by all of us on a regular basis?