I don’t ever want to be in that position but what would I do if I was present when a young girl was being raped or some individual being brutalised by a gang of savages in a public place? I don’t know but I pray to God I would have the moral courage to do the right thing even if it meant injury to myself or worse. If there had been people on the bus in Delhi would they have allowed the 23-year-old to be hideously tortured and done nothing? Seeing as how all those who were joined in the horror one has to wonder. By that token those who walked past the victim did nothing for a very long and cruel sixty minutes.

In many ways when men and women of good mind do nothing it is also a crime. You and I, we believe we would not stand by and allow the unspeakable to happen. I fear we would. Which is why these past three days, like some malevolent cloud over my head, I keep thinking not just of the pain and the agony and the sheer madness of these men and their ugliness but of those who did nothing and the scary thought is that it could have been you or me...and how could they join in?

So, even as we protest much of the rage is at ourselves for our collective weakness. We have stopped caring for that cliché of fellow man. Neighbours don’t know neighbours. Screams our silent and calls for help fall on deaf ears. In many ways, it is easy to explain exercising our option not to get involved. Not our business. That our justice is weak, our police inept and dense and our hooligans too well connected. I am not a violent man but I would have no qualms about their being court martialled in a summary, fast track trial and opt their punishment be meted on live TV and I would come to terms with pulling the trigger in a legal situation if it so demanded.

But let justice wend its weary way because by next week most of us will have let it slide, the shrill media would have trotted off to some other excitement and you’d be at some new year dinner yelping plastic happiness at each other. The point is we don’t know how to stop the hurtle of madness. No one does. It grips the capital of India and is relentless.

Where are our saviours, where are the Kejriwals and the Annas and that lot, who promised Indians a new future? Isn’t it a corruption of the soul when you assault any person in so grotesque a fashion? Perhaps only finance is the corruption they wish to combat. We have no history, no heritage if we allow savagery to win.

The fact is there will always be predators among us, walking our streets, sharing our transport, sitting next to us. Even our friends.

All we can do is be vigilant and improve the odds…the system does not work for you. We must work for it together.

What would I do if I was a witness? Heartbreaking, I do not know.