An evening at Haridwar Railway Station

Last Thursday (7th March-13), I had gone on a sales trip to Haridwar to meet one of our business partner in UK for Uttaranchal territory sales planning. I reached the office of our partner in the afternoon & finished the job around 4 PM. Same day I had a return ticket to Delhi from Shatabdi Express & it was scheduled around 6.10 PM from Haridwar. I reached Haridwar railway station around 5.00 PM. There was good one hour to spend at the railway station. The station was crowded with people waiting for their respective trains. Since Haridwar is a holy city, people from all walks of life, from different regions in India & world were present. All the benches were occupied, so I started roaming on platform no. 1 & observing the people. Beside me two foreigners were standing & talking to a disabled person with polio in both legs. One of them was tall & thin & the other was a little bit healthy. The tall guy was who was talking to the person on skates felt that it inconvenient to talk to the person who was sitting on skates. He sat on the floor opened a packet of chips & a cold drink. Soon after this the other person also sat on the platform & joined the discussion. To my surprise all three were sharing the same packet of chips & cold drink bottle. They were talking in the manner as if they all were old friends. After 15 minutes the train announcement was made & the tall person asked for permission to leave from his friend & guy on skates. Both of them shook hands with him & said good bye.

Then the person on skates took the wrapper of Chips & cold drink bottle towards dustbin to dispose it. On the same platform there were other people also who were littering the station with the leftovers. These fifteen minutes really touched my heart & gave me the lesson of life-

1.       When we get a better social & economic position in society in society, we forget the basic tenets of humanity & start treating the unfortunate & unprivileged ones in inhuman way.

2.       We often try to follow the western culture, but we still don’t know our own culture which teaches us kindness, love, respect & humanity.

3.       Does education makes us civilized? The answer is no. An uneducated, physically disabled person knows that littering is bad, but on the same platform there were so many educated people doing it.