सुहृन्मित्रार्युदासीनमध्यस्थद्वेष्यबन्धुषु।साधुष्वपि च पापेषु समबुद्धिर्विशिष्यते॥
suhṛn-mitrāryudāsīna-madhyastha-dveṣya-bandhuṣusādhuṣvapi ca pāpeṣu sama-buddhir viśiṣyate
Word by word
The verse says
Among well-wishers, friends, enemies, the indifferent, the neutral, the hateful and relatives — and among good people and bad alike — the one whose understanding is even stands out.
In plain words
A list of seven kinds of people, and then an eighth division on top.
It covers everybody. That is the point of making it so long.
And then the odd last word: such a person viśiṣyate — stands out, is distinguished.
Where you've felt this · in community
The woman who chairs the residents' meeting gives exactly the same twenty seconds to the man who agrees with her and the man who has opposed her for nine years. Both of them know she does it. It is the reason the meetings end on time.
Going deeper
The final clause is the one that makes this hard, and it is easy to slide past.
Seven categories of relationship is already a wide net. Then the verse adds good people and bad — sādhuṣu api ca pāpeṣu — which moves it from social position to moral worth, and that is a different kind of claim.
This is the same move as 5.18, and it runs into the same question. Does an even understanding mean treating a harmful person as you treat a good one?
The traditions answer no, and the text supports them: the same book has Krishna destroying wrongdoers age after age, and Arjuna is being sent to fight. Evenness is not being offered as a policy for how to act.
What it describes is what a person sees before they decide anything. You can see the same thing in someone and still stop them. The verse is about the seeing, not the stopping.