Troubled..

I do live in a small little world, and things outside it (frankly) don’t bother me too much. But there are times when certain events strike deep, even when I am not directly involved.
There was a murder recently, in the nearest town. Sadly, that is not the most disheartening thing I am going to talk about. But firstly, the facts so that you get the whole picture. The man who was murdered was a doctor with a very profitable tobacco business on the side. His wife does a lot of socially relevant activities. Basically, a very prominent, well known family. This man was on his way to the club for his routine tennis game when he was kidnapped. The kidnappers demanded a huge ransom to the family. Three days later, his body, weighted down, was found in a dam 200 km away. The dam had luckily run dry, and the partly decomposed body was recovered and identified.
The post mortem revealed that the murder was done the same day as the kidnapping. The family meanwhile was living in the anticipation that he would return, because the ransom threats implied he was still alive. I met a friend of the murdered man today. Apparently someone in his office was a gambler and to pay back some huge debt swindled a lot of money from the office. The murdered man is supposed to have caught him and asked him to return the money. The swindler, unable to do so, plotted this murder, and carried out; the ransom was to increase his profit.
These are the facts. And sigh… have not even gotten to the worst part.

Rumors.
A prominent political leader was jealous of him because he wanted to establish a tobacco factory in the same area, and hence knocked him off. This is the least harmful rumor.
This man has an only son, who is 34 and as yet unmarried. So the next rumor is, he had an affair with some girl, who got pregnant, and she arranged for the murder. It does not stop with that. The girl is supposedly an erstwhile cine star’s daughter.
The wife of the murdered man, a very refined lady, did not shed one tear in public. So she was branded as ‘unfeeling’. Not just that. She is supposedly having an affair with a younger man; so she wanted her (72 year old) husband out of the way.

All these rumors to a family not even a week into their mourning? The worst is, EVERYONE talks. Servants, office staff, the local vegetable vendor to the club members. Everyone. On their face, with complete disregard to their feelings. Appalling, to say the least. This man’s wife has done a lot for female upliftment in the area – education, employment, everything. The doctor has practiced for a long time, with free medical camps, lesser fee to poor patients, the works. He started the first poly clinic in the town and was instrumental in training the current generation of doctors. And society as a whole is waiting. For an opportunity to bring the family down.

Anyone slightly in the public eye gets the brunt of tongues wagging. Someone we know had a staff member who got pregnant out of wedlock, and he went to see her and help her out financially. So people put all this together, and here is the rumor – this person had an affair with his own staff and had a girl baby! And you know who the rumor reached? His wife, the very next day. I don’t even want to imagine that lady’s reaction.
I don’t understand this at all. Why? Jealousy? Or just plain joblessness? Man, give me some of your free time! Why does it hurt everyone if a person is doing well? If a person is happy with their lot?

These days, finding people mindful of society and wanting to do good is rare. Even if people have the capacity (financially), they don’t have the heart to part with their money or their time. In such a milieu, the way society as a whole treats families in public view is plain deplorable. Doing some good has become, in my opinion, damn difficult. People, who go out of their way to help others, end up in the receiving end of wagging, forked tongues. We can say, why should we care about society? We should do good to others for our satisfaction. But hey, we live in this society, and we are all human. At least I don’t have the strength to put up with such a flood of public opinion. I can’t be completely immune. However hard I try, I am affected, somewhere in a corner of my mind.