People talk about girls being judged on their character depending on the kind of attire they wear. But do we talk about the problem of judging from the base. If you look closely in your own thoughts, inside our own self, most of us will find that we judge pretty much everything. People who are feminist, people who are of contemporary thoughts, people who are ready to embrace the open world thinking, they all judge. We all judge.
I consider myself an individual who is indifferent to any kind of bias including but not limited to gender, cast, race, religion, ethnicity, or anything. But today I realised how wrong I was.
A small incident that happened earlier in the evening today brought me down from my false sense of being a bias free individual. There is a small shop beside my hostel building which is quite famous among the college students as their favourite place for smoking. Behind the shop and alongside the hostel building there is a free space, partially hidden from the bustle of the road. Most folks smoke their life out sitting on the low-rise boundary wall. Today when my friend(ex-roommate) called me to meet him there, as he usually does, I saw one of the seniors of our hostel. The immediate thought that came to my mind was, "He also smokes!". Now think about this situation. I hardly know that guy but had a previous notion of him being a decent fellow, and hence the shock. But is it right. How do I judge that person to be a smoker or not just by the place where I saw him. In reality he was there to talk with his friends just like me. What is notable here is the thing that I found out how big a hypocrite I am. I assume students to be non descent if they smoke.
If I delve into it to the finest details I find that the way we are brought up is the cause of all these. The way we are trained from childhood is how our mind shapes up to be later. The society and their ripples is what we are fed right from the beginning. Just a year back I had made myself believe that alcohol or cigarette are not necessarily the parameters for a good or bad person. But even then my brain unconsciously judges people on their choices and activities.
Is it because of my own mindset or is it because of the mindset I have developed as a result of my upbringing in which society had a great role to play?
Well, I still try to not judge. But for us Indians to do so, is really difficult. Maybe the future generations will be better in this.
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Dear Subham,
ReplyDeleteWell its heartening to see you admit candidly about the innate tendency to judge. But, I do not think being judgmental is necessarily a tendency prevalent in Indians per se. Actually, being judgmental is a quality irrespective of the nation but more of a the kind of family we live in. So if you have parents judging you from childhood or relatives checking you for every trivial thing or believing perception more than facts and taking one incidence as a reference point for all the other incidents that are similar to it but might not end the same way, then of course its neither to be blamed. I also think judging somebody is largely because we as humans always fancy idealism and perfection. The ground reality is that even Gods were never ideal and nothing in the Universe IS IDEAL , not even a machine has 100 % efficiency, and humans are far off from perfection, they are prone to mistakes to erroneous decisions, and we are aware of this lacking quality of perfection and hence the craving to judge , and to deem everything that is a slightest deviation from this perfection as an anomaly, and look down upon it as if it was never meant to be. I have realized people's habits , what they do, how they behave is largely an agglomeration of the combined experiences of his or her life till now . And there is ALWAYS a reason why a person is the way he or she is. The moment we see him or her can never be the parameter for us to make an opinion of him or her because that will always be a glimpse of him or her , and it might also be possible that, the glimpse that meets our eye is actually a pretense for the world just to blend in, as a camouflage from the cruel world where anything that doesn't aim for perfection and idealism is always inevitably crushed and trampled or turned into an outcast.
Lovely post btw.
So well explained di. It is human to judge... haha.
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