Humanity!!! I know you are still there. :-)

Do good people still exist on this planet? Will someone help me when I am in dire need of it? The consensus on this question may be a 50-50 divide. But I belong to those positive 50% of the people because of one incident that completely changed my perception about the world. It made me believe that there is some humanity left on this earth.

It happened two years ago. I was a computer science student and was studying in class 12^th at that time. There was a hackathon that was going to be conducted in Bangalore and a team of 3 students was to be selected. I was the lucky one among the three. Now the thing is that my school was a residential school and we weren’t allowed to use or keep mobile phones with us. But whenever we used to go out of school for some trip or a competition we somehow used to sneak phones with us on the pretext that they would be needed for communication. And that was the time of the year when Jio had announced unlimited free internet for everyone. That was almost similar to finding a waterfall in a desert.

So we packed our luggage and got ready for the competition (Actually it was more of a picnic for us than a competition). We had our train from Hubli to Bangalore at around 10’o clock in the night. We strolled around in the railway station for a while and then went to the platform and boarded the train. The train looked a quite empty but we thought that maybe we were lucky enough to have the whole compartment for us. Without much thought we indulged ourselves back into the smartphones which we had and spent our time. The train started and we were all in jolly mood enjoying ourselves. A little while may be after half an hour the ticket collector came to us and asked our tickets. We casually opened the tickets from our bag and showed it to him. The TT started, “You have to pay the fine”. We enquired, “Why should we pay the fine? We have the tickets with us and our seats are confirmed”. He gave a very subtle reply,” Bacche yeh train Chandigarh jaa rahi hai”. We were shocked. What the hell had happened. We had boarded the wrong train. Instead of boarding the train on platform no 4 we had boarded the train on platform no 5. He started pressing on us to pay the fine. But we didn’t have enough money as all our expenses were already sorted out by our school authorities. Then he made us get down at the next station and handed us to the station master of that station.

Meanwhile many questions were running through my mind. Now it would be very difficult for us to reach Bangalore the next day as we didn’t have enough money and also it was already midnight and finding a bus would be very difficult. And what will we answer to the principal of our school. And above all that the three of us who were going happened to be the school captain, school vice-captain and house captain of our school. Everyone would make fun of us if they would get to know about it. Everything was messed up.

We explained everything to the station master and he seemed to be a very good person. He gave us the money needed to go to Bangalore and told us a place where we would probably get buses. We boarded an auto and the auto guy also turned to ditch us by making us go around a same place again and again. We were relieved enough to find out that the station master was following us and he scolded the auto driver for doing such thing and took us to the bus stop and ensured that we boarded the bus and waited with us till then. We reached Bangalore the next day on time and attended the competiton. My uncle who used to stay in Bangalore came later on and helped us with other things. We didn’t tell a word about this to our school authorities because we knew that if we would have told this thing then we would be surely reprimanded for it. We reached back our school the next day and everything was back to normal.

We might have not won the competition that day. But the incident brought back my faith in this world and yes, it made me believe that there is humanity still left in this world. So don’t lose hope in yourselves and in the humanity because god is always waiting to perform miracles for us and make us believe that he is there. And that night I saw god in a stranger.