The Global Kindness Department

Run by people who don’t know they work here.

Charles Dickens once wrote, “No one is useless in this world who lightens the burden of another.” True enough. He may not have imagined the sheer heroism required to lift your spouse’s overpacked suitcase onto the airport conveyor belt while your back stages a mild rebellion—but suddenly, that quote makes perfect sense.

The other day, I was watching a short video montage—little snippets of strangers helping strangers. A man pulling a kid back from oncoming traffic. A woman handing an umbrella to a soaked delivery boy. A young man pushing an elderly lady’s car after it broke down. No one in these clips was famous, and not one had a sponsorship deal with a sports drink. Just people who decided, in that moment, to care.

It’s tempting to dismiss such moments. “Ah yes, random acts of kindness—so lovely on YouTube. In real life, people don’t care.” That’s the easy stance. The cynical stance. The stance of someone who has possibly misplaced their empathy in a drawer marked To Be Sorted Later.

But here’s the inconvenient truth: most people are too busy, too tired, or too tangled in their own private catastrophes to notice someone else’s. They’re waiting for someone else to be kind to them.

And yet, kindness costs almost nothing. You don’t need Swiss bank accounts to hold the currency of compassion. In fact, it’s the strongest currency on the planet—unaffected by inflation, not subject to forex rates, and accepted in every time zone.

Here’s something I’ve always found curious: sometimes, it’s easier to be kind to a stranger than to someone you know well. A stranger arrives in your story with no backstory—no old arguments, no personality quirks, no mental sticky notes saying, Last time I helped him, it was a disaster. With strangers, we simply see the need, and we act.

Someone once suggested a curious thought: imagine there are twelve people in the world—unknown to each other—quietly keeping life from tipping into chaos. Not politicians, not billionaires, not social media influencers. Just ordinary humans in far-flung corners of the earth: a teacher in a dusty classroom in Rajasthan, a carpenter in the Swiss Alps, a blind musician in Amsterdam, a taxi driver navigating New York chaos, a station clerk in rural Pakistan, an artisan somewhere in Jordan… and a few more, scattered across jungles, outbacks, and forgotten alleys.

They don’t even know they’re “working.” Their acts of kindness, empathy, and thoughtfulness—small, unseen, utterly unglamorous—are what keep the world stitched together. Twelve isn’t literal, of course. It’s just a handy way to picture the countless ordinary humans quietly stopping life from falling apart…all while keeping life from tipping into chaos, one awkward, everyday moment at a time.

I know this because I’ve been on the receiving end. Years ago, after a heart attack, I was rushed to a Hospital in Kottayam. Their cardiac surgeons weren’t available, so they could easily have just redirected my ambulance straight to the next hospital—the one known for heart surgeries. But they didn’t. While one team ran my ECG, another quietly went ahead and gave me the necessary pills and even shaved me—so that when I arrived at the next hospital, I’d be ready to go straight into surgery with minimal delay. They weren’t saving me for their hospital. They were saving me, period.

Then there’s the other kind of kindness—when you step in to help and end up complicating your own day. Many years ago, when I had just started my career in the Middle East in Jebel Ali, a young man on my bus asked which stop to get off for a job interview. I told him it was just before mine, a short walk away. When we reached, he asked if I could walk with him to show the way. The Dubai sun was auditioning for the role of “blast furnace,” but I agreed. He thanked me warmly when we found his destination, and I, in turn, walked an unnecessarily long—and very sweaty—detour to my own office. Some people give blood; I gave sweat.

So yes, sometimes kindness comes from people we’ve never met, and sometimes we give it and get a little scorched in the process.

Maybe Dickens was onto something. Or maybe he was just observing the grand cosmic joke: that the world keeps spinning not because of genius or money, but because ordinary humans keep bailing each other out…one awkward, everyday, slightly ridiculous moment at a time.