Travelling from Chennai to Hyderabad I was offered the opportunity to be stranded in the airport for almost three hours. Not knowing what to do I was shifting my place of waiting and thereby witnessing different passengers doing different things. Thats when I marked a group of laud-guys and their families. The thing so conspicuous about this bunch was the way they were talking in English to each other and to their kids trying to put a civilised aura around them, or so they might be thinking. Except the skin colour and their attire there was nothing Indian about them. I was feeling amused when a teenager girl in very plain cloth came to this group with a kid. I was thinking this might be a different set of passengers all together. In a little while I could understand that the kid belonged to this group and the girl was a maid; a girl who might be barely 11 or 12. And then their boarding gate number was announced and they moved as a team. And then the “owner” of the maid handed her three carry-bags and the whole party shifted. It made me mad to see how such educated and (hopefully) well travelled guys can be so insensitive. To me it was gross injustice.
This led me to think ob "what is justice?”. Can we really have a universal definition of justice? If the apparent victim does not mind is it still injustice? Like in the above situation the teenage-girl did not seem to mind (though she was obviously not enjoying it). Trying to generalise I think the lack of equality fosters and gets manifested as injustice. However, is not inequality highly personal? Is not inequality impossible to remove? Those who argue otherwise may try to protest against any economy or business class seats in aeroplanes. Those who argue otherwise may try to convince the auto-makers to have only one brand of vehicle in market.
Of course, there are gradations in inequality and injustice as well. Some, like lack of food in one pocket and wastage of luxury food in another, is a severe form of inequality or injustice. But then does the human hormones know these? Do we feel a kind of envy, when we see someone with a cuter partner, and a different form of envy when we are hungry and someone else is having a party?
I do not think so. Of course to know for sure one needs fMRI kind of analysis taken from different classes of human beings. From my personal experience I can confirm that the envy I felt as a kid seeing some other kid with better stuffs than me is not any different from the envy I feel now in different circumstances. And the more interesting observation that I can make is that it is rare that I feel envy. And its true for most. Our brain is wired to focus on things that are positively engaging than things that are depressing.
I think it can be concluded that injustice is personal and the feeling of pain is because it is a relatively unexplored field of speculation.
