A poem posted by Pratibha Sofat on Infy Blogs led to a discussion today about how we respond to wrongdoing. I had been disturbed by a news report on NDTV India the previous day about the treatment of women travelling on trains. Reading her poem brought those feelings back.

We call ourselves human, yet we subject others to humiliation and indignity. We watch people being pushed around, intimidated, and denied the respect that we expect for ourselves. Afterwards, we find ways to explain what happened or persuade ourselves that there is little we can do.

In my comment, I wrote:

Imaan zindagi ka zinda nahi raha,
Aadmi bhi ab aadmi nahi raha!

Someone asked why we could not be bold enough to react. My immediate response was, "Easier said than done." I agreed with the need to speak up, but knowing that we should act and finding the courage to act are different things.

The difficulty of speaking up

It is easy to imagine ourselves being courageous when we are sitting safely at our desks. Confronting someone in a crowded train is another matter. There is uncertainty about how the person will respond, whether anyone will support us, and whether the confrontation will make things worse.

I initially suggested that the women should have confronted and even beaten up the men entering their compartment. That was an angry response. It also placed too much responsibility on the people already facing the harassment. Why should a woman have to prove her courage simply to travel in a compartment reserved for her?

The responsibility belongs first to those behaving badly. It also belongs to the authorities expected to enforce the rules and to those of us who witness what is happening. We cannot keep asking the person being mistreated to solve the problem alone.

Forgiveness and accountability

Another participant offered the image of a stone thrown into a still pond. The ripples diminish as they move away from the point of impact. In our minds, however, they sometimes grow larger, affecting our relationships with ourselves and others. His advice was to forgive, forget, and learn to live again.

There is something valuable in that thought. Carrying anger indefinitely can hurt us long after an incident has ended. But I struggle with the suggestion that forgetting should be our immediate response to wrongdoing.

A person may choose to forgive someone and still expect that person to be held accountable. They may recover from an experience and still insist that others should not have to endure it. Moving forward does not require us to dismiss what happened.

We should also be careful about calling an incident "silly" when we do not understand what someone experienced. What looks minor from a distance may have left another person frightened or humiliated.

Responding does not have to mean retaliation

The discussion eventually reached another question: does hurting someone who has done wrong make us happy?

That is a fair challenge to an angry response. Anger can make punishment seem like an answer before we have considered what it would accomplish. But speaking against wrongdoing does not have to mean hurting someone.

It can mean supporting the person being targeted, asking others to help, reporting what happened, or demanding that those responsible for public safety do their jobs. The appropriate response depends on the circumstances. There is no single act of courage that fits every situation.

We must also distinguish an accident from deliberate misconduct. Someone may stumble or push another person unintentionally. That possibility deserves consideration. It should not become a convenient explanation for every complaint.

What kind of life?

My central disagreement was with the idea that learning to live again was the whole answer. Recovery matters, but so does the kind of life to which we return.

I want to live in a society where people can object to mistreatment without being told that they are unnecessarily making themselves unhappy. I want self-respect to mean something in our daily conduct, including how we treat strangers and how we respond when someone else is denied dignity.

No one can challenge every wrong, and fear does not make a person weak. Still, when we have an opportunity to help, we should take that responsibility seriously.

Living with self-respect includes standing up for ourselves. It also includes making it a little easier for someone else to stand up.