Let me first narrate an interesting anecdote.

Rashmi had just completed her MBA and joined a reputed company as a Management Trainee. After years of study and competitions this was her first job. She, like most of her other friends had many dreams and was looking forward to a great career and a good life. After few weeks of orientation she was put in the team of Rahul. He had an excellent reputation in the company and people believed that he will be growing fast and high in the corporate world. He was six foot tall, mustachioed, had well-built athletic body and knew how to get his work done with superiors, peers and subordinates. While normally he maintained his composure, he was a no nonsense person and didn’t tolerate fools around him for long. He had his own way to let people know that he is unhappy by speaking just few firm words and by his stern expressions. He was quite patient while giving guidance to Rashmi. Couple of points where she was repeatedly committing errors Rahul used to correct her politely. One day a report had to be sent to Rahul’s boss when he was travelling and had no time to prepare or check himself. He asked Rashmi to do the same and send it directly to his boss. As the fate would be, she committed the same error in the report and sent it. Rahul not only got a reprimand from his boss for this error but was told that he was slowly becoming careless. Though he didn’t say anything to the boss, this time he was angry. He called Rashmi to his cabin, looked at her sternly and said in a booming voice, ‘Not Again. Once more you make the same mistake you are out of my team’.

But he was not aware that his problems had just begun. This one statement was enough for Rashmi to make her cry. She started sobbing loudly and left the office early. She was on leave for next two days. When she rejoined the work she straight away went to the head of human resources and lodged a complaint against Rahul that he had threatened her. She wanted immediate action to be taken against Rahul and she reassigned to some other boss. Head of human resources was a seasoned professional. He tried to convince Rashmi that Rahul was a dignified person and she’s had some misunderstanding. But looking at her mood, she was reassigned to a different team. Rahul was gently counselled to restrain himself, for no fault of his.

Over a period of time Head of Human Resources became friendly with Rashmi and she herself settled in the environment of the company. One day while having lunch together he asked her about this incident again. He told her that professionally speaking it was she who was wrong and she overreacted. That’s when the cat came out of the bag. Rashmi was most apologetic. She said that right from her childhood she was terrified of men having mustache since her own father was strict and stern and sported huge mustache. In her worldview all men who had a heavy mustache were inhuman, insensitive and harsh.

This may be just a story, but not something that we have not seen in life. To the extent that Hrishikesh Mukherjee made a movie called ‘Golmaal’, in which Utpal Dutt brings out his prejudice so well about men not sporting a mouche. The movie helped me in deciding the title of this blog, though the content was already brewing in my mind. In this story, poor Rahul suffered not because what he had done or not done, but because of some past experience of Rashmi. How cruel it sounds. But in real life many times we are on both sides of the fence. Sometimes making others suffer and sometime suffering ourselves for no fault of ours, just because someone else has had an experience which we are not even aware of. I’ll probably need few more such anecdotes to illustrate how deeply it affects all of us.

Jyothi belonged to am Iyer family from Chennai. She was brought up in a conservative environment where there were few parties and people were vegetarians and teetotalers. It so happened that she came to Delhi for her post-graduation, fell in love with a Punjabi boy, Maninder, and despite initial resistance of their families married him. Both she and Maninder were in love and genuinely took care of each other. After few weeks of their wedding, Maninder invited some friends and relatives for dinner. Like a typical Punjabi gathering there was a free flow of liquor, non-veg food and risqué jokes. Everybody enjoyed. Maninder was on seventh cloud with his closest friends and relatives, cracking jokes and laughing loudly. By midnight the party got over, guests departed and Maninder and Jyothi returned to their room. Maninder was in high spirits. But when he entered the room he found Jyothi to be very upset, terrified and sitting in a corner. He had never seen her like that before. All his cheer drained him. He went to her and tried to hold her hand. Unexpectedly, she pulled her hand violently. Maninder got worried, but maintained his cool. He asked her calmly:
What is bothering you Jyothi?
He was stunned with her response. Covering in deep fear, with a quivering voice she asked him, would you hit me now? Now this was completely unexpected. After a great evening this was something like an anti-climax.

Maninder maintained his composure, told Jyothi that there is nothing like that and he loved her like always. To ensure that she slept well without fear, he went to the other room and slept there.

Since they both cared for each other and there was no communication block, after few days he asked Jyothi why did she have the fear of being beaten and why was she so terrified. Once again he was stunned by what he heard. Jyothi told him that in their family nobody used to have liquor. But she had a very good friend whose father used to drink every day, had non-veg food and then beat his wife and daughter. So, in her worldview every man who had liquor and non-veg food would beat his wife after having them. Does it sound little more familiar this time? Do we again see a person getting blamed for a crime he didn’t commit?

There are many situations in our professional and personal lives when we see these things happening with us and around us. Sometime we realize why something is happening and some other time we keep blaming others and circumstances. Often we become hyper-sensitive to the worldview created by us. We create a protective layer around ourselves and if we find anything remotely related to our worldview we react, actually over react. In the above two examples we didn’t see any reaction and situation was brought under control soon. Now let me illustrate an example where there’s a reaction.

Payal and Mohit were married recently. They were a DINK couple. Double Income No Kids. Both were professionals. One day Payal returned home slightly early. When Mohit came home he was tired. While trying to freshen up and relax he asked Payal, can you give me glass of water? Instead of water he received a mouthful from Payal. You MCP, can’t you get the water yourself? You feel wives are your servant? We both are working, earning almost same and equally qualified. You think you can order me? All you men are the same and have medieval mind set. Now I regret marrying you. There was no way for Mohit to explain that if the roles were reversed he would have done this happily for her and that in his eyes both were equally important. Once again a person suffered for no fault of his but for something that happened with the other person many years ago and completely unknown to him. Often such a mind-set or the worldview formed by our own past experiences or stories we’ve heard since our childhood is deep rooted. In this case Payal had seen a childhood where not only his father was dominating on her mother, but she had been venting her frustrations by discussing her agony with Payal. Slowly Payal had started believing that all men are the same, they are bad, dominating on wives and never cared. She had decided quite early in life that she won’t allow her husband to dominate, dictate or treat her shabbily. What she didn’t realize that in the quest to do this she had actually become so aggressive that now the pendulum had moved completely in the other direction. Now it was she who was dominating, dictating and enforcing her thoughts on her hapless husband who had just no clue why things were happening the way they were. He had become a victim of a worldview with which he had no connection.

It’ll be folly for us to believe that this happens only in our personal lives. We carry our worldview with us wherever we go. I’ll give two simple examples.

As a young executive Arjun had been fortunate to be working for an organization that was headed by a very mature and level headed person. He trusted people, had faith in their abilities and gave them independence to work. Slowly this culture got permeated everywhere in the organization. But one fine day he learnt that two senior most executives, completely trusted by the boss, misappropriated a large amount of money and the blame was passed to the boss. He was sacked, left in ignominy and spent many years of his life in needless litigation. This left a big imprint in the mind of Arjun. After that he could never trust anyone, always had a suspicion about the motives of people around him and was never a good boss himself. This also ensured that due to the mistrust he carried about others within himself good professionals never wanted to work with him. He never attained the rightful heights in the corporate world that he was capable of otherwise.

On the other hand, there is a different possibility too in the similar circumstances. Here Arjun had a good CEO with everything remaining same as above, except that this CEO always got support of people around him. He eventually became a very well-known name and during his time the organization achieved many successes. This made Arjun create a worldview that it is good to trust people around oneself, empower them, support them and desired results shall be achieved. He implemented the same in his professional life. But one fine day the second part of the story repeated with him. He was cheated, sacked, left in ignominy and spent many years of his life in misery and litigation. He never realized that due to his rather simplistic worldview he had not put in place the checks and balances that his role model CEO had created silently. Once again, the worldview held by a person caused him and others around him great harm.

In both these cases the worldview of Arjun was formed based on the events that happened with him in early years of his professional life. This worldview eventually was responsible for his conduct in his later years and he suffered immensely due to that.

The story of mustache and Utpal Dutt keeps repeating around us far more frequently than we actually observe. Don’t we often hear statements like – all men are rouges, all in-laws troublesome, all north Indians are crooks, all servants are thieves, never become friendly with your staff, you should never trust anyone in life, all women are temperamental etc. Such statements and beliefs are due to a worldview that we form based on our own personal experiences or imbibing from someone else who we implicitly trust. We start believing that an entire group of people will behave according to our worldview. This results in people around us paying the price for something that they have not only not done but have no clue about. As it is said sometime in hindi, ‘kare koi aur bhare koi aur’.

Isn’t everything becoming very confusing? It is widely believed, rightly so, that experience is a great teacher. As we grow old we accumulate our experience and it makes us richer in terms of understanding life. Not only this, we often say that sometime explaining things to people may not work. Let them go through the grind, get a first-hand experience, only then will they understand. Chanakya has gone to the extent of saying that we must learn from the experiences of others because learning by our own experience comes at a huge cost and delays. And here I am who’s trying to turn everything on its head and suggesting that worldview formed by our own past experiences may not be correct. So what is right? In fact the entire subject of statistics and analytics is based on data analyses and predicting certain events to happen based on the past events. We therefore need to ask if our experiences and worldview are same.

Experience is in my view is an event that happens or a story that unfolds and keeps unfolding all the time. It is unemotional, dispassionate chronicle of the happenings. What we draw out of that event or story is our learning that in turns develops our worldview. Experience, in short, is the raw material that goes in the factory of our mind and worldview is the processed output of the factory in which the raw material undergoes many twists and turns, cutting and sorting, polishing and packaging. Sometime the experience is simple and similar for all and worldview developed is also simple and similar. Let us say we keep milk on fire. After some time it’ll boil and spill over and so on and so forth. We put our finger in fire it’ll burn. There would be innumerable examples of this in our day to life where each one of us will draw same or similar conclusions. But bring in some complexity in the situation and we will see everyone drawing his own conclusions, sometime close to each other but never same. Let us say four friends go to watch a movie. If you ask them for their learnings we can bet that they will have their own learnings, based on their own selective perception and past experiences. Same four friends travel from Mumbai to Pune in a car. Ask them for their views, learning and experiences they’ll again be very different. Same car, same journey, same companions, same problems everything same, but still output, conclusions and world view is different. Only because raw material was same or similar doesn’t mean that output will be same but it depends on what happens during the processing inside the factory. So our worldview is a creation of the raw material, that is the experience, and the processing of that raw material in our mind gives us the output, which is our worldview. Same raw material of similar experience may create two opposite worldviews and persona. Ashoka, after the Kalinga war left everything and took refuge under Buddhism. America, under President Truman, after winning the Second World War dropped atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

My Little Thought Of Life in this context is that we need to appreciate and understand this difference and be discerning enough in the conclusions that we draw from the same experience. Before we form a worldview based on an experience we must always question ourselves whether this experience is specific to an individual or situation or it can be generalized over a larger section of people and situations. While experience should continue to enrich us intellectually, we have to be judicious in its use when it effects our behavior. This also significantly determines the direction that our life takes, how good or bad we are as human beings, what we achieve in our life, how happy we remain and how happy are people around us due to what we do. We must endeavour to create a positive worldview of people and events, create positivity within self and around ourselves.