I can still clearly recall the precise moment I realized I had contributed to the issue.It was an October Tuesday morning. With coffee in hand, I was mentally practicing a presentation as I made my way to the metro station. A woman in a faded blue sari, perhaps sixty years old, stumbled over a broken tile and fell in front of me. Her veggies were all over the sidewalk.. I watched three people step over her tomatoes before I even processed what had happened. I almost did the same. Almost kept walking because I was late and busy and someone else would help . But I didn’t. I crouched down. Helped her gather her onions. She was crying, but it wasn’t from pain rather, it was from the overwhelming loneliness of being invisible to dozens of people who saw her but failed to notice her. Five years have passed since then. I still think about her face. We talk about civic sense like it’s a policy document. Something schools teach through morning assemblies about keeping streets clean. But civic sense isn’t knowledge.
It’s a means of being present in public areas. It’s the opposite of the daze we experience when we stroll around with our eyes fixed on screens and earbuds in, using the world as a backdrop for our own story. My grandmother was civic-minded. She referred to it as being decent. When I was eight years old, she made me walk half a kilometer back to dispose of a chocolate wrapper that I had dropped where someone else would have to clean it up. I felt enraged. But I remember the lesson: your convenience ends where another person’s labor begins.
She talked to strangers. She genuinely wanted to know if the security guard had had his fever checked and how the vegetable vendor’s daughter was doing in school, not in a showy way. She believed that everyone she came into contact with was a complete human being with a life as complicated as hers.
The Architecture of Indifference
Our cities are designed to make civic sense difficult. The broken tile that tripped that woman had been broken for months. Someone had reported it, probably. But the system was opaque, the person responsible was overwhelmed, and so the tile stayed broken. People learned to step around it. Eventually they stopped noticing.
Indifference scales like this. It begins with malfunctioning systems and concludes with inattentive people. The garbage truck arrives at my house sporadically. People leave their bags on the corner when it doesn’t arrive. Dogs rip them apart. It starts to smell. On the opposite side, everyone is complaining about the authorities. I’ve also done it.
But last year, Mrs. Nair, a retired teacher on my block, started waking at 5 AM when the truck was missed. She’d gather the bags herself, organize them neatly, tape a note: “Please collect. Residents waiting.” She’d sit with her tea until the truck came. She wasn’t angry. She was just present .
People thought she was crazy. But slowly, the corner got cleaner. Truck drivers recognized her. Others felt ashamed walking past an old woman doing what they should. She made the invisible visible the labor, the waiting, the simple need for services to function.
Mrs. Nair never lectured. She acted as if the street belonged to all of us, which meant it belonged to her, which meant she was responsible.
That’s the core of it. Civic sense is rejecting the spectator role. Deciding you’re not a customer of your city, or a victim of it, but a co-owner.
The Small Rebellions
Grand gestures aren’t necessary to improve civic sense. These frequently backfire, giving the impression that civic engagement is only for activists with time and passion rather than weary commuters with mortgages.
What works are small, consistent rebellions against not my problem.
The rebellion of waiting: Last month, I watched a young man hold a train door for an elderly couple struggling with stairs. The train was packed. People made annoyed sounds (like oh no ,come on ) because they were impatient and didn’t want to wait.. Someone yelled he was delaying everyone. He didn’t argue. He just waited. We left thirty seconds later. Those seconds felt like resistance against the tyranny of efficiency.
The rebellion of cleaning up after others: My friend Priya carries a bag when she hikes not for her trash, but for others’.She doesn’t share anything about it. She simply does it because she finds it intolerable that someone who believes their single wrapper is inconsequential is ruining a place she loves.
The rebellion of speaking up, awkwardly: This is the most difficult. I witnessed a man yelling at a scared teenage waiter a few weeks ago. Everyone averted their eyes. For thirty seconds, I did the same. I think he’s doing his best, I said quietly as I approached him. It was frightful. My hands trembled. However, he ceased yelling. The server mouthed thank you. I’m not courageous. Confrontation makes me extremely uneasy. However, the version of myself that watches someone be humiliated and does nothing bothers me more.
Teaching by Example
We won’t improve civic sense through more school assemblies. Those treat the symptom behavior rather than the condition disconnection.
What works is witnessing. Children learn when they see adults being civil. Not being told to be civil, but being it. When they see their father helping a neighbor carry groceries. When they see their mother challenging an unfair rule at the resident’s association. When they see adults treating service workers with dignity.
I taught high school for two years. The students with the strongest civic instincts weren’t the ones with the most civic education. They were the ones whose parents modeled engagement who volunteered, knew their neighbors, complained constructively then worked to fix things.
One student, Arjun, organized a park cleanup for his final project. Not because he loved nature he didn’t but because his grandfather had taken him there every Sunday, and he couldn’t bear watching it become a dump. His motivation wasn’t abstract. It was love, specific and personal. That’s what we need: not duty, but attachment .
When It Costs You
I want to be honest. Civic sense isn’t free. It costs time, energy, social capital. The woman who falls helping her makes you late. The broken tile reporting it takes forty minutes on a website designed to discourage you. The shouting man intervening might get you punched.
There are days I don’t pay these costs. Days I’m too tired, too scared, too wrapped in my own chaos. I’m not proud of those days, but I don’t shame myself either. Sustainability matters.
But I try to pay more often than not. And I’ve learned the cost is usually smaller than I fear. Not in medals in the quiet knowledge that you’re not adding to the world’s indifference.
After I helped that woman with her vegetables, she pressed two tomatoes into my hands. Insisted. I tried to refuse she needed them more but she said, You stopped. Nobody stops. I carried them home and cooked them that evening. Ordinary tomatoes. But I remember them better than any fancy restaurant meal.
A Different Infrastructure
We need to talk about infrastructure differently. Not just roads and sewage. But social infrastructure the spaces that bring people into contact as humans.
The tea stall where regulars argue about cricket. The park bench where retirees feed pigeons. Annoying, inefficient, chaotic. Also where civic sense is practiced.
I’ve started seeking these spaces deliberately. Walking through markets instead of ordering online. Taking buses instead of cabs. Going to the same barber for years. Not because these choices are morally superior, but because they keep me embedded . They make me look at the people every day learn their names and find out things about them that make it hard for me to not care about the people. The people I see every day they become familiar to me. I learn their names and I hear their stories and that makes it difficult for me to feel indifferent, towards the people.
Last Diwali, my building’s watchman, Ramesh, invited me to his home for sweets. I’d known him for three years his daughter’s name, his mother’s illness, his dream of opening a shop. But I’d never been to where he lived, twenty minutes from my apartment. He wasn’t the watchman anymore. He was Ramesh, who worried about his daughter’s math scores and made excellent laddoos .
Civic sense is easier when you know who you’re being civic for.
The Long Game
I’m not sure if civic duty can
be improved at scale. The opposing forces are strong: anonymity, distraction, economic worry.
It can be done. One person, one act, one stopped commute at a time.
Start with noticing. Put your phone away on public transport and look at faces. Learn the names of people who serve you. Thank them specifically. Thanks for getting this here quickly is different from Thanks. The first sees a person; the second is a reflex.
Pick one small thing to care for. A tree. A stretch of sidewalk. Tend it without permission. Let your care be visible. It’s contagious. Not always, not immediately. But sometimes someone joins you.
Speak up when it’s safe, support when it’s not. If you can’t intervene, check on the victim afterwards. If you can’t solve a broken system, document it and share it. If you can’t give money, give attention – the rarest resource.
And forgive yourself for imperfection. Civic sense isn’t saintliness. It’s the accumulated weight of ordinary people deciding, repeatedly, that they belong to each other.
Conclusion
I never learned her name. Never saw her again. But I carry her the surprise in her eyes when someone stopped, the way she pressed those tomatoes into my hands like a treaty between strangers.
We have a choice, every day, dozens of times. To be part of the flow that steps over, or the interruption that stops. To treat shared spaces as no one’s responsibility, or as everyone’s, which means ours .
Civic sense isn’t a skill. It’s a posture toward the world. A decision that the woman in the blue sari matters. That the broken tile matters. That the person invisible in plain sight they matter, and so do we, and so does the fragile us that we are building in the spaces between our separate lives.
It’s not easy. It’s not efficient. But it’s the only way I know to be human in a crowd. The only way to walk through a city and not feel alone.
By: Simnan Bashir
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