Perspectives, Context and Benchmarks

Perspectives, Context and Benchmarks

Wanted to write about this topic for long. These three words may appear to be disconnected, however I believe they have quite a bit in common. Whenever we appreciate something or dislike something there is an unsaid benchmark we tend to compare it with. For example if someone says Jagjit Singh is a good ghazal singer he would be benchmarking him against Indian awful singers like Pankaj Udhas. However when we see Mehdi Saheb, then we realize where does Jagjit Singh and singers like Ghulam Ali stand. However this is my perspective. From someone else’ perspective I am sure they would have different reasons to give for liking or disliking Jagjit Singh, or say any food or any culture etc.

Whenever we read a book we tend to agree with it provided the author writes something which is in consonance with our predisposition towards the idea presented in the book. It appears enticing but is very tough to judge or read a book without any biases. We all are prisoners of our prejudices and biases which have impacted our upbringing and social context.

When we tend to compare two things we tend to forget the difference in context we are talking about. This mistake is most common in courses on leadership in management institutes. The students are asked to compare two leaders without giving a thought that comparing across time periods, across different socio-economic and geographical settings is impossible. However management minds are trained to perform comparison even when it has only academic value (if at all).

From Indian’s perspective Bhagat Singh was a hero but from British perspective he was a state criminal. From our perspective so called Mujahidin’s in Kashmir are terrorists but from their perspective they are messenger of God and fighting a holy war. Therefore finally most of the debate boils down to who holds the upper hand. For example saying that Greek was the older civilization which worked consciously towards making a nation and state is flawed as history belongs to the victorious and the arguments are preserved which are heavily biased towards something more popular.

We must never forget which context we are talking about. If we understand the context most of the futile debates which we see in our society won’t even exist. However most of the times the deeper we get into something be it music, management, literature etc we tend to become closer to philosophy. Perhaps that’s why philosophy is the ultimate form of human emancipation and learning. Most of the big authors talking about business strategy or some other mantra tend to give too much of philosophy in their books which appear to be ridiculous to the readers. From the reader’s perspective this philosophical thought is not tangible and hence it is not valued. However once these readers themselves have sufficient reading behind them they also tend to become philosophical.

Questions which appear inane once like “What do you want to do with your life” “What does happiness means” etc become the most important questions to address. That may be a reason why we see so many billionaires starting some social initiatives or some fund helping cause of the poor. For them that seems to be giving back to society and going nearer to the unseen power which is known as the God Almighty.

The problem arises when people tend to pass value judgments on others without fully understanding the contexts and the perspectives. That’s why so much of social tension is caused.

When we see poor homeless people we want to help, but when it appears that the person on the street is “happy” what should we do and how should we do? But the bigger question would be should we do something. We can see (again through our perspective) that the person is not living in a condition which is apt for a human life. But then we say that from our benchmarks. If his family is not getting three meals, or is not getting decent income or not getting medical attention we tend to analyze it based on our own benchmarks and standards. May be if these people had written the constitution they may not have made “right to food” as the fundamental right because from their perspective “regular food” is a luxury and cannot be a right per se.

This issues has always intrigued me and I have hopelessly tried to answer it. When we say “Every child should be a child and should be taken care of etc etc” what do we actually mean? And who gave us the so called “educated class” to jargonize and presume so many things that whatever we are thinking is indeed correct. I believe the answer would be that someone has to take the initiatives. If no initiatives or nothing new was said or done the humanity would still be living in the cages. However was living in cages a worse option than what we have today? The problem in answering these arguments would be that we would answer them based on our current benchmarks. We could say “see we would not have been able to talk to many people apart from close clan (under the influence of communication technology these days”, we would have said “we would have felt so much of heat, would have been eating uncooked food etc (under the benchmarks of eating cooked food these days, having AC etc.”) .

The fundamental issue is that all these answers are made from current benchmarks and hence can never be used to answer those days when these things never existed. Was the world a worse place before car, mobile, computer etc came?