People often surprise you.
2 years ago I was in Delhi on 31st December when in the middle of the night I got separated from my friends and to make things worse I had misplaced my cell phone.
I was terrified at that point — it was past midnight, there was not a single cab in sight. I tried asking five or six women for their cellphones but they looked through me and walked away.
I was lost and just standing on the road when a man approached me and asked me what was wrong. All kinds of things were going through my mind — you hear so much about Delhi being unsafe that I was terrified, but this man who came upto me said, ‘don’t worry, I only want to help you‘ — and that’s what he did.
He cancelled his own plans and dropped me to safety.
That’s the thing with this world — we read so much that we stop believing that someone wants to help and on the day I needed it the most, it came not from the 6 women who I thought would help me out, but the 1 man who approached me. Not all men are like the ones you read in the papers…so stop believing it.
This is an experience shared in a post on the Facebook page of Humans of Bombay. This is no fictional story with a happy ending but a first hand experience of a woman on streets of Delhi. We often read how unsafe the city is, how lecherous city’s men are and what not. But the truth is every city has it’s good and bad people. Blaming the whole city for the sins done by a few is not the right way to make opinions.
Yes, the rate at which crime against women is increasing is alarming, but at the same time there are also good men who are ready to help selflessly. One should be cautious but believing all that one reads in the newspapers is not a right thing. Believe in humanity, it is not yet dead. Believe in goodness, it is not yet gone from the world.