What's So Good About Good Company?

Choose it wisely for your own sake.

- Ananta Sinha & Snigdha Jauhari

AIready, we have heard so many times, that it is good to keep good company, because good company will make our life pleasant and bad company will help us to experience a life in jail, or even worse. We came across an excellent anecdote to illustrate the aforesaid, so here it goes... (Courtesy: excerpt from interview of Ramgopal Verma. Film maker; Google)

When I read about the Nirbhaya case, I had certain thoughts-How did those four guys attempt that? It is highly unlikely that they had started that evening with a plan of trapping a girl.

So, when they saw that girl at the time of the night, did they see it as an opportunity and pounce on her? Did the thought occur to all of them at the same time? Or, one of them instigated and others followed? As I was thinking about all this, I remembered a similar incident in my college: There was a girl, whom we all nicknamed Rifle.

She was a labourer, who worked at a construction site, next to our college.

Given our age, her raw beauty appeared very seductive. We used to ogle at her endlessly and discuss her in the evenings. She drove us mad.

One night, when we seven friends were sitting on the parapet wall of the college, one friend pointed at the fields and said, "I've seen Rifle coming to the site early morning through those fields. Shall we go there and hide tonight? And tomorrow morning, when she comes, we will secretly carry her away." There was a half-minute silence.

Suddenly, one guy got up and shouted angrily, "What the hell are you saying? Are you mad or what?" And, the moment he reacted violently, the others shook up.

They also shouted at him for such inhumane suggestion. Seeing this reaction, the first guy immediately apologized. Now-say-that; that this (good) guy had not reacted violently. Instead, had he too (smitten by that desire) encouraged him. Seeing this, the third guy might have thought, 'I think we can do this.