Helping Hands - is it for the poor or the rich ??

The other day, I was walking down from office along with a friend to catch an autorickshaw to get back home. Traffic was at its best, and one cannot expect anything from an evening traffic other than snarling horns, ever-poisonous carbon monixide, and above all, speedo-maniacs behind wheels ready to torture the poor accelerator pedal as red turns green. For many, green doesn't mean GO - it means FLY! ( ofcourse I must admit, it's the same for me too when I am at the controls!).

Well, that is not what I wanted to talk about. I was just trying to set the background for a very small incident which I happened to witness that day, and which forced me to ask myself a question "Helping Hands - is it for the poor or the rich ?"

The mood of traffic was obvious - everybody was eager to get back home, and so was I. My friend and I paced up our steps on the foothpath when I noticed a middle-aged man on a dilapidated old scooter loaded with milk-cans almost caught off-guard and fall down. "Just a sec, let me help that guy." The moment he was back on his feet, I moved on."Will he be able to manage ?", my friend asked. "Thats fine, he can do it. It was just an imbalance." and we continued our walk. A minute later a thought crossed my mind, there were a dozen people standing at that place, but nobody stepped forward to help. As if I couldn't help it, my train of thoughts started running with a loud humm. Was it out of sheer indifference ? or was it due to inertia( the famous Newton's law stating - objects will remain in the same postion till an external force is applied on them) ?

Had it been a girl ?? Leave alone the odd dozen standing there, another dozen would have materialized from thin air to help her! Or what about a guy in decent clothes ? I'm sure he would have atleast got 1 or 2 helping hands. But what about people whose fortune forbids them to wear decent clothes, ride a vehicle, stay anywhere else other than the wretched footpath ? They slip and fall a thousand times, but it goes unnoticed.

May be I might never be able to find an answer, but the question remains - "Helping Hands - is it for the poor or the rich ? is it only for good looking girls ? or also for that pitiable old woman in rags ?"