Machines have entered the soul

There was that kind of soothing chill in the air which one often hails and enjoys in the month of October in Punjab when it is neither summer nor winter, but only an interregnum between the two seasons. He was driving to his office, unmindful of how others felt, he was steering through the busy road with a kind of peace and an accord with life which one experiences only occasionally.

All of a sudden, sirens blared from a vehicle behind. It was an ambulance sounding the hooter frantically to negotiate the office-hour traffic. He tried to push his vehicle to the left in order to clear the way for the emergency carrier. The ambulance was able to come parallel to him, but a truck moving ahead stopped its progress as it would not give way. He sympathised for the ailing person and his or her relatives and pondered how they must be feeling strangled and suffocated by an unheeding crowd who moved like machines that were insensitive to the misery and pain of fellow beings.

The pensive reverie almost clutched him for the next five minutes until the ambulance could make some headway. The hooting vehicle left the scene and he felt slightly relieved. He wondered why people closed their eyes, ears and minds to someone else’s suffering. He reflected how bad he felt when he read about a road accident in the newspaper and how his heart would reach out to the victim and his bereaved kin. He often was pained when he read about an accident victim succumbing to his injury simply because the metropolitan crowd just moved by without caring to drop him at a nearby hospital.

He mourned the fact that machines had reduced humans to unfeeling automatons who move and behave without sentiment like machines unless they were directly affected by an untoward situation like disease or injury. From the age of the primates, we have evolved quite a bit to be a part of our civilizational age. Yet, in many ways, these attributes of civilized tenor are the real culprits behind man’s dehumanization, especially in the metropolitan cities where in hollow pride they claim to have touched the acme of progress.

He was a village born young man and he relished his connect with rural life which stood for the bliss of sharing. The humbler rural counterparts of the metropolitan man still have a lot of sensitivity and exude the evidence of milk of human kindness. They feel. They act. They share sorrows and joys. They have time for one another. He lamented how machines had entered the souls of successful men!