Monday, March 25, 2013

POV

I am biased!

From trivial football games to something I’ve believed in all my life.
It isin’t too difficult to realize that you’re biased towards yourself when playing some sport. It was an instant revelation to me during football games with friends. Instinctual replies like, “No way that’s a foul!” and “Dei! Legal tackle da!”  were like a way of life.
However, most occasions in life are not so trivial.


I have always been passionate and proud about the land that I was born in. Hence, it came as a shock to me when something bad was pointed out about my country. I realised that I’d been brought up in a society that strived to show only what’s best about it. Unfortunately, History is not just about the good stuff. Reading this book called the ‘Age of Kali’ exposed me to incidents such as the “Police Action” of the Nizam’s Hyderabad and the so called “Liberation” of Goa.

It was then that I realised that I had some sort of a “mental firewall” preinstalled, which kicked into action when issues close to my heart came up. This discovery was a great boon, as I now started thinking twice and began checking if my thoughts had been blocked. It was clear that my point of view was not the only point of view and it might not be the right point of view.
In a battlefield, the enemy will have an equal number of valid reasons to hate you and seek to destroy you.  


The thing with the human mind is that, once it decides on something or takes up a side, prejudice kicks in. Anyone who is on the other side is projected villainous. We tend to look at them with contempt and let the hatred grow in our hearts. This hatred clouds our judgement and we refuse to listen to reason. We start believing that for us to progress; they have to be put down. That is never the case, for life is not a game of tennis, where there can only be one winner.

One person who pops into my head right now is Steve Jobs, who was everything that has been said in the previous paragraph. But he was quick to correct himself and came out with his realization during the 1997 Macworld Conference at Boston.