31 August 2026 • Spirituality • My Story • Life • Society

Do not mock a fragile boat while you are still crossing the river.

We only really believe in misfortune when it happens to someone else. We laugh at people who trip, who fail, who beg, convinced that such things happen to other people, never to us. We live as if we will remain young forever, as if our strength and our looks are permanent rather than things that would eventually fade with time.

That is precisely why we sometimes fail to respect our elders, forgetting that they too were once stronger, more active, more handsome and more beautiful than we are today.

Once, on a train journey, a boy of about fourteen entered our coach and asked passengers for coins. A fellow passenger, a man of my age, did not simply ignore him. Instead, he mimicked the boy’s voice and laughed, saying he was only “acting” and was not a real bhikari (beggar). No one stopped to ask why a child was begging on a train instead of sitting in a classroom. I was uncomfortable because of that laughter.

At the time, I could not explain why. It was not only pity for the boy, but also the realisation that nobody considered that the same misfortune could one day happen to them.

But mockery is never as harmless as it sounds in the moment. It teaches everyone listening that a stranger’s dignity is freely available for entertainment. Silence would have cost my fellow passenger nothing.

Mockery is a choice, it takes someone else’s misery and turns it into a joke, and a joke made out loud invites everyone nearby to join in until an entire coach is laughing at a child who did not ask to be anyone’s entertainment.

I once read a line that stayed with me; “Do not mock a fragile boat while you are still crossing the river.” I have thought of that boy every time I have come across those words since. None of us have finished crossing the river. The elderly woman walking slowly today once ran to catch trains herself. The boy on that coach could, in another life, have been either of us, sitting comfortably with our jokes, certain that misfortune belonged to somebody else.

Kal kisi ki bhi baari aa sakti hai, tomorrow could be anyone’s turn. So the next time laughter rises at someone else’s bad time, perhaps the better question is not why they are suffering.

It is whether we are truly certain our own boat will never be the fragile one.