Commutism

Why do people feel entitled to something they don't have and the others have?

Moving to Bangalore is by far the most suffering and sacrificial thing I have ever done in my life. The only good thing about this wretched city is my husband is in it. As if this isn't bad enough, travelling to work everyday doesn't make it any better. The bus journey takes over 2 hours one way.  More often than not, I get a seat to sit in the bus and I choose my seat wisely since the journey to home is long. Given my physical stature, people are drawn to sit next to me. Let me put it this way. People see me as a thin girl occupying a whole seat that I don't deserve. This is one of many such incidents. The bus was almost empty and a lady boarded. I could see her eyes scanning for thin passengers just so she could sit next to them and occupy two seats and leave the scrap to the thin one. As fate would have it, she sat next to me. The bus seemed to be taking in more people in the following stops. A girl was standing next to me and she shifted her entire weight on me by leaning on me. I kept pushing her away gently but she didn't budge. She showed faces and frowned every time I slightly rubbed her off of my shoulders. This went on for a while and as I am no stranger to this sort of behaviour, I kept pushing her away while I managed my neighbour's bags in my seat. I am going to call these people as “commutists” for reasons you will soon understand.

Have you ever attempted this before? Ever tried subtly pushing away a human being that is temporarily inhabiting your shoulder in a not-so-crowded bus? They look at you in a way that makes you feel so little that you don't deserve to live. That look tells you that you are the most inhuman person who couldn't take a little extra weight just because someone missed their “first come first serve” in a country of one billion people. That look will make you doubt your existence and purpose of your being. Just one look that says “You have to take it otherwise you will be judged.” And the commutists know this!

Anyway, at one point, as I couldn't take it anymore, I told the girl standing next to me not to lean on me and transfer her weight on to my shoulder as it hurt me. She gave “the look” and adjusted her place a little. I rubbed my shoulder and turned away. She leaned on me again as the bus took a turn. I disregarded it as momentum even though I knew it was an excuse. I looked at her and sighed.

The commutist sitting next to me exasperated and said, “Adjust a little bit. You are very thin. You don't need so much space.”

“Why? Just because you couldn't control eating one extra morsel of biryani?”, I retorted. She was shocked. Of course she was shocked. Mocking fat people, even if they are body shaming you, is rude. Right?

The commutist who was romancing with her boyfriend over phone on my shoulder jerked away from me but she was shocked too.

The shock is more from an entitled point than from the unpleasant remark.

I was sitting, she was standing. In her head, we weren't equal so she wanted to deprive me of what I had.

I was thin and comfortable, she was fat and uncomfortable in her seat. She thought it wouldn't be the worst thing to make me uncomfortable if she filled my seat too.

Just to experiment with this, I gave up my seat to a lady who was not thin or fat by the commutist's standards. I stood near the commutist who was leaning on me. She was no more leaning on me. She was leaning on the lady sitting in my seat. And the commutist who was sitting next to me, made the lady uncomfortable too.

Moral degrees of commutism: It is one thing to give away your seat (in a two hour bus journey) to someone who is pregnant or old or invalid. That makes you a very nice person. A tender one at that. A human, if you will. If you let commutists push you over just because you got something that they did not, even though you and the commutist paid the same to travel, that's just normal. You are not doing any good deed here. Any other behaviour exhibited is unacceptable, evil and inhuman.