Last week the world media were making a great deal of the story of the New York taxi driver, who went out of his way to return a handbag containing some $30,000 worth of cash and jewelry to an Italian tourist who had left it in the back of his cab. The tale was considered all the more remarkable since the taxi driver, a Bangladeshi-born medical student, declined to accept an award from the grateful owner.
Unfortunately the very fact that what Mukul Asadujjaman did made headlines around the globe says something quite disturbing about modern morality. Implicit in the coverage of this story was the view that the taxi driver must have been mad to pass up an incredible piece of good fortune.
After all was he not a poor medical student working his way through college? Would not all that money have transformed his circumstances and allowed him to complete his studies without further financial worries? Yet despite this, he went to considerable trouble to trace the rightful owner and returned it, refusing to accept anything in recognition of his honesty.
The reality is, of course, that Mukul Asadujjaman behaved as he did, simply because it was the right thing to do. He told reporters, very frankly, that it had indeed crossed his mind that this considerable sum could ease his medical studies. It would have been extraordinary if it had not.
Nevertheless he knew that it would be wrong to keep something that was not his. He may also have assumed, rightly as it turned out, that the loss of so much cash and jewels would have been disastrous for the owner. But then again, even if a woman had left the handbag worth millions to whom $30,000 merely constituted small change, it still rightly belonged to her. Anyone who found it had absolutely no business hanging on to it.
Even though he had driven over 100 miles to an address he had found in the handbag, Mukul Asadujjaman rejected any reward because he said, he had merely been doing his duty as a Muslim. Three years ago another Bangladeshi taxi driver, Osman Chowdhury returned a bag left in his van with 31 diamond rings worth half a million dollars. He sought out the owner and accepted a $100 reward, purely to compensate him for the lost fares while he did so.
The media found Chowdhury’s behavior all the more remarkable because the woman who owned the rings had given him a tip of just 30¢ for her original $11 ride.
It may well be that the majority of those who saw the stories of these two taxi drivers would have behaved in the precisely same way in similar circumstances. However, a cynical international media, perhaps because it is long used to reporting a world of inhuman violence and shameless political spin, could not resist implying that these two good and not very well-off individuals were in fact idiots, rather than outstanding examples of entirely proper and honest behavior.
