A 2am conversation with myself about who I owe, and how much
5 min read
The Question at the Red Light
When I was studying abroad, my roommate taught me something on my first day. In the US, he said, we nod to everyone we pass. A small acknowledgement. Just a nod.
That habit came back to me this morning. I was walking home after my driving lesson. Two guards were talking outside a gate. A car coming the other way. Me, walking past. And suddenly the question wouldn’t leave me alone: who stops for who? Who opens the gate? Who wishes anyone well?
It sounds simple when you write it down. But I’ve been carrying it all day.
The Ones Who Stopped for Me
There have been times when people actually stopped for us. Not because they had to. Maybe they just took a second to ask how you’re feeling. Maybe they said simple words like, it’s OK, relax, everything will be fine. It might not seem like much. It’s just words. But those words stay with you longer than you’d expect.
My parents taught me this when I was younger. Whenever someone came to our house, a visitor, a stranger, anyone, they didn’t leave without eating something. Maybe just a biscuit. Maybe coffee. Maybe a full meal. But never empty-handed. There was something in that small act. An acknowledgement. A moment where you mattered enough to pause for.
But look at us now. The world is moving so fast, everything is developing so fast, that we don’t take a minute to stop and acknowledge the people around us. There’s a dialogue from an Indian film I love: “Life is a race. If you don’t run, someone will trample you and run ahead.” To an extent it’s true. But it doesn’t mean you can’t take a minute to acknowledge the people around you.
When I was small, I didn’t know my neighbors’ names. I called them the Uncle with the Ford or the Uncle with the Toyota. I was a kid. I didn’t know any better. But now I’m older and the question stays the same: do you know your neighbors? Do you wish them? Do you acknowledge them? Or are they still just the Uncle with the Toyota to you?
It Was Never the Heart
For sixty years, I believed a story that shaped how I saw myself and everyone around me. Thirty eight witnesses watched a woman die on a street in New York. Not one stopped. I carried that number like a weight. It said something about us, about human nature. But last week I learned the story wasn’t true. The New York Times admitted it in 2016. Not all of it was a lie, but the myth was. A man did shout. A woman did go to her. We built an entire understanding of indifference on something that wasn’t quite what we thought.
That bothered me more than the original story.
I started looking at what actually stops us from helping. There’s this study from Princeton in 1973. Young priests in training, told they were going to give a talk. Some were told they were running late. On the way, a man lay coughing in a doorway. Sixty three percent of the ones without hurry stopped. Ten percent of the hurried ones did. I read that and thought about every meeting I’ve rushed to, every person I’ve passed because my phone was buzzing with something urgent. The research wasn’t blaming us for being bad. It was saying we’re caught.
Then I found something that made me sit up. In real streets, real fights, CCTV showed someone stepped in 91 percent of the time. Not 10 percent. Ninety one. We’re not the story we tell ourselves.
But here at home, on Indian roads, it’s different. Seventy four percent of people said they wouldn’t help a road accident victim. I wanted to know why. The answer came back like a slap: 88 percent were afraid of the police. The questioning. The paperwork. The Good Samaritan law was supposed to fix this in 2016, but people still didn’t know it existed. In 2023, 172,890 people died on Indian roads. Most of them in those first hours. The golden hour, they call it. The hour when stopping matters most.
Fear is what costs us, not coldness.
And while we’re frozen in hurry and fear, something else is happening quietly. One person dies every four seconds from loneliness. Four seconds. I sat with that number for a while. It’s the kind of number that changes how you see a traffic jam, a crowded apartment, a house where someone hasn’t spoken to anyone today.
Where the Circle Begins
So where does my duty end? That’s the question that won’t leave me alone. Peter Singer would say distance doesn’t matter. If I can save a child drowning in a pond, I can save a child drowning somewhere far away. The obligation is the same. It sounds right when you read it, but it also sounds impossible. It sounds like I should give everything until I have nothing left.
But there’s another side to that. His critics say a duty without limits breaks you. The Gita says something close to this too. It says do your own dharma, the thing that’s yours to do, even if you do it imperfectly. Don’t try to live someone else’s duty.
I think the answer sits somewhere in between. There’s this old Stoic image I came across: concentric circles. You’re at the centre, then your family, then your neighbourhood, then your city, then the world. The work is to slowly, over a lifetime, pull those outer circles closer to the centre. Not to abandon the people nearest you, but to stretch a little further each time. To notice one more person. To stop once more.
There’s something else that stuck with me. Helping actually lights up the reward system in your brain. It’s not punishment dressed as virtue. It feels good. And people who volunteer tend to live longer, though I’m careful with that because correlation isn’t the same as proof. But it suggests something I want to believe: that a life spent stopping for people isn’t a life spent diminished. It might actually be the opposite.
I still don’t know where my circle ends. But I know it starts closer than I thought.
The Echo
Think of one person who stopped for you when they didn’t have to. This week, stop for someone. You don’t have to fix their life. You only have to not walk past.
Maybe duty is not a debt. Maybe it is simply paying attention to one more person, one more time.
Echos Of My Mind
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