Who is good and Who is bad?

I have a friend who believes that all the people in this world are bad. There is one who believes that most of them are good. Thinking over this a thought came to my mind, In our whole life we start on categorizing people we come across in two categories, Good People, and Bad people.

Now question comes how do we define people to be good and bad. This thing is very simple when we meet a person just once. For example, when you are standing in a row to get a ticket from railway station, a big guy comes who refuses to stand in row and tries to get a ticket. Or say you are waiting for green light for few minutes, suddenly a car passes by ignoring traffic rules. The first thing which comes to our mind for which people are these people are bad.

Now let's look at a bigger picture. By incidence the first person who came grab ticket without standing in queue has an old sick mother waiting for him at the platform who can't afford to be on her own. The second person who broke traffic rules had a son he has to pick up at school at 5:30 and it is already 5:40. If you know of these facts, will you still call these both persons to be bad? Do you not see anything good in them?

Things get complicated when we interact with same people day by day and then start making opinions about them. You have a boss who pushes you hard for work, marks you absent for coming late but considers fairly when you ask for a leave, how will you categorize him? Is he good or bad? Does it mean that he is good as well as bad? More importantly if some tactics of this boss are bad for you, how does Company perceive this? If a boss can get you work more company will consider him to be good, won't it? This brings us to a point that good and bad are things can be relative. What is good for us can be bad for us and vice versa.

One thing that is important here is that sometimes things are good for us but we just dont realize it at that moment, for example our parents always wanted us to read more, study well. Our teachers wanted us to study, take part in extra curricular activities. It is just that at that time we dont realize that those things are good for us. We just blame parents/teachers for being so hard with us.

Ok, let's consider another aspect of good and bad. An auto driver finds a cell phone in the back seat of his auto. The passenger is gone. Now auto driver is in dilemma what to do with that. He has few options 1) Try to find out owner of mobile by using numbers in the phone 2) give phone to police station 3) Keep the phone for himself. There is a very big chance that a poor auto driver might just keep the phone to himself. Now that auto driver again on his way with a passenger he finds that a person is lying on the road after an accident, all people are surrounding him but no one is doing anything. He just asks the person in auto to drop off and he puts the person who suffered into his auto and gets him to hospital. Meanwhile he loses quite some amount, he loses the fare he had got if he had not asked the passenger to leave when he decided to help the injured. He also probably loses quite a big amount of his time in helping the injured man getting to the hospital. Now I have a question for you is this auto driver good or bad?

As a matter of fact the above example was quite a simple, we can take more complicated cases. There have been many criminals who have done bad things but they have also done few great things for which they are worth praise. I off course refrain from naming anyone. A lot of time persons who bends laws are bad de Jure but de facto they are doing good things. All of us believe that Robin Hood was a good person.

All above ideas lead us to a point where we can say that no one is absolutely bad and good. It is just how we define good and bad which matters. Simiarly situations lead a person do different things at different times. So it is not very easy to determine good and bad in a person.